Forcing ephemeral connections

Under some circumstances, you might want to force ephemeral connections to be used for IP*.*PIPE communications, even if they do not cross a NAT firewall. For example, if your configuration requires more than 16 piped processes on a host, ephemeral connections make it possible to exceed the TCP maximum. However, forcing ephemeral connections can have serious drawbacks:

  • If an ephemeral connection breaks between a monitoring agent and the monitoring server to which it reports, the monitoring server might not be able to originate a connection back to the monitoring agent.
  • The address of a monitoring agent configured for ephemeral connections is randomly assigned in the monitoring server logs. Tracing and troubleshooting are more difficult as a result.
  • Extra configuration might be required for enabling communications between the monitoring agents and the Warehouse Proxy agent.

If you want to force ephemeral connections, use the EPHEMERAL option of the KDE_TRANSPORT environment variable.

  • EPHEMERAL:Y or EPHEMERAL:OUTBOUND forces outbound connections to be ephemeral.
    Important: You can specify EPHEMERAL:Y or EPHEMERAL:OUTBOUND for a monitoring agent or a remote monitoring server, but not for a hub.
  • EPHEMERAL:INBOUND forces inbound connections to be ephemeral.

You can specify the EPHEMERAL option in the Kpp_X_KDE_TRANSPORT_OPTIONS parameter in your PARMGEN configuration file .

For information about ephemeral pipe support on distributed components, see IBM Tivoli Monitoring: Installation and Setup Guide.