Best Practices When Restarting Secure Connector for Cast Iron

Answer

When using the secure connector, there will be times where it will need to be restarted due to in-house maintenance or configuration changes. When doing so, follow the process below:

1. Undeploy all projects that uses the specific secure connector that will be shut down.

2. Stop the secure connector on the client machine. To verify the connector process is completely stopped, open .agent.pid file located in C:\Program Files\IBM\Secure_Connector_1.6.1.0.2. When opening the file, it should contain the PID (process id) value. Note that value, open the Windows task manager and click the Processes tab. Make sure to enable "Show processes from all users".

The screenshot above shows the secure connector process running with a PID of 4704 (NOTE: The PID changes every time the secure connector is restarted) which matches the value from the .agent.pid file. After the secure connector is shut down, this process should no longer be on the list.

3. After verifying the secure connector is shut down on the client machine, view the Cloud Web Management console's secure connector page. When viewing the page, ideally it should show the most up-to-date information. To force a refresh, choose the refresh button on the bottom of the page. This will allow you to get the most up to date information.

With the secure connector stopped on the client machine, the status should be set to STOPPED. NOTE: It is possible that the STOPPED status may take some time to appear after shutting down the secure connector, therefore continue to refresh the page. The speed of the network connectivity between cloud and the secure connector client machine is one of the factors in having the status show STOPPED in 2 min or 7 min.

4. After verifying the Cloud Web Management Console shows the secure connector as STOPPED, proceed in executing maintenance or configuration changes.

5. After making changes, start the secure connector on the client machine. Verify the secure connector is running by checking the PID in the task manager as previously mentioned in step 2.

6. After verifying the secure connector is running on the client machine, open the Cloud Web Management Console and verify the status has changed to RUNNING. Use the same technique in checking for the most up-to-date status as mentioned in step 3.

7. After verifying that the Cloud Web Management Console states the secure connector is now RUNNING, proceed in deploying the projects.