Discovery fails when a proxy server is specified. (NETIQKB37028)

WebSphereAppSrv (and WebSphereAppSrvUNIX) uses the NetIQ Agent as an intermediary when making web requests, including when accessing the perfservlet during discovery (as well as when accessing the perfservlet to retrieve metrics when Monitoring Knowledge Scripts are run).  The NetIQ Agent is a Java program, which uses the Java APIs for retrieving web pages.  Unfortunately, proxy support in the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is unreliable.  In particular, the JRE may behave improperly in two different ways:

1.         Sometimes the proxy hostname and port are ignored completely by the JRE, causing the proxy server to be bypassed.  If the host specified in the URL (e.g., the perfservlet URL) cannot be contacted directly without going through a proxy server, the connection will fail.

2.         In other cases, the hostname and port are properly used by the JRE to connect to the proxy server, but the JRE fails to send the username and password.  In this case, if the proxy server requires authentication, the connection will be rejected.

This is a problem with the network libraries used by the Java Runtime Environment version 1.3.  There is no fix for this problem.  However, the latest version of the WebSphereAppSrv and WebSphereAppSrvUNIX modules (version 2.1) no longer uses this problematic code, so upgrading to version 2.1 of the module should resolve this issue.

In the perfservlet URL specified in the Discovery Knowledge Script properties dialog, be sure to specify the hostname of the agent machine being discovered explicitly, rather than using localhost.