Thanks for that Thomas.

libkeepalive appears to be able to compile on AIX,  and if I can get it
past the right people we may have a solution.

Steve.


On 28/05/2014 12:03 AM, Thomas Denier wrote:

-----Steve Harris wrote: -----

I have a situation that is causing me grief.  As part of a V5 to V6
upgrade I have implemented library managers.  These live in one part
of
the network and the library clients live in another separated by a
firewall.  The customer insists that timeouts be implemented on the
firewall for any session over 60 minutes: its a security thing for
some
reason and is non-negotiable.

At times I get a lot of mounts queued, in the past when these were
local
mounts, they would eventually resolve themselves but now they time
out
in the firewall, never complete, and I get a cascading blockage
until
the whole server grinds to a halt.

I'm told I can set recourcetimeout to less than the firewall timeout
and
that will cause the mounts to fail, but a lot of these are oracle
and
DB2 backups and they won't retry in a reasonable manner.

Yes, I could use devicelasses and mount limits to reserve drives, and
I
could put some stuff on disk that now goes direct to tape, but
neither
of those are palatable.

Of course the easiest thing would be to have the library clients use
keepalives on their sessions, as was added in recent versions for
NDMP
backups.  I have raised an RFE to this effect at

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/execute?use_case=viewRfe&CR_ID

=

54030

and I'd appreciate your votes.

Does anyone have bright ideas on how to proceed?  I have thought
about SSL port forwarding, but apparently bypassing the controls that
way is frowned upon. Even if the RFE gets up, it won't help me as
half of the clients are still TSM 5.5 for the next six months or so
while we cut them over.

If your TSM servers run under Linux you can use libkeepalive to
make TCP connections use keepalive packets. We also have firewalls
with a one hour timeout between our library manager and its
clients. We had the kind of problems you describe when we first
set up our current TSM environment. We have never had any
trouble with firewall timeouts since we installed
libkeepalive and set the appropriate environment variables
for the TSM server processes.

Thomas Denier
Thomas Jefferson University Hospital
We have