Troubleshooting
Problem
This technote identifies an issue that can occur where IBM Rational ClearCase 7.1 incorrectly uses ports (other than the standard 371 albd_server port) that are below 1024.
Symptom
Atria Location Broker (ALBD) on Windows hosts incorrectly assigns ports for child RPC servers.
ClearCase is known to operate correctly through firewalls in internal networks if the following conditions are met:
Port 371 (UDP and TCP) is passed through to any/all ClearCase server hosts from the allowed hosts.
All ports over 1024 are open from the allowed ClearCase client hosts to needed ClearCase server hosts.
In ClearCase 7.1 this behavior has changed due to a defect.
If ClearCase users are behind a firewall, but with all the above mentioned ports open, they will still have problems working properly with ClearCase.
The errors are intermittent, but you can have errors such as:
Cannot access the view ABC
Unable to create connection to view_server on host XYZ
However, if you try the same command later, it works fine.
Cause
This issue was identified as a product defect under APAR PM19998 which was introduced in ClearCase 7.1.
Diagnosing The Problem
When allocating ports for child processes (such as view-server processes, or others), the ALBD server on Windows attempts to allocate ports using a port range of 49152-65535. However, the ports used are allocated outside of this range.
The only time the port ranges are correct is when the multisite plus firewall port settings are used, and ONLY for the processes started in that port range.
A specific error message for this port allocation problem can be seen on Windows 2008 Server:
Albd(1288): Error: Unable to allocate port in specified range: 49152, 65535
Albd(1288): Error: bind: 0
Related Information
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Document Information
Modified date:
07 November 2019
UID
swg21443524