set up outbound thread as a server

[Kevin Scantlan]

Has anyone ever set up an outbound thread as a server?  We have a vendor who wants us to set up that way so that they can initiate the contact from their machine or from their failover machine.

Topic

[James Cobane]

Kevin,

We have done this.  It terms of connectivity, once the connection is established, it really doesn’t matter who is the client or the server.  Client/Server really only matters with the initial negotiation of the conversation.

Hope this helps.

Jim Cobane

Henry Ford Health

[Kevin Scantlan]

Things were working fine for us, but after we lost connectivity for short time, the vendor system tried to re-establish connectivity, but the TCP on the engine’s server was sending back a reset and refusing to reconnect.  Ever had anything like this happen?

[James Cobane]

Did the OS on Cloverleaf show that it was in a ‘listening’ mode (and was Cloverleaf showing ‘opening’) when the vendor was trying to connect?

[Jim Kosloskey]

Kevin,

Have you tried:

   Shutting down the foreign system manually

   Stopping the Cloverleaf thread

   Start the Cloverleaf thread

   Start the foreign system

If that works then this may be a case where they do not recognize Cloverleaf has gone away.

Years ago I had just such an integration and we experienced the same problem. Once I determined they needed a controlled shutdown/startup I asked the vendor to look more closely at their setup. They corrected something but I do not recall what and that does not matter because this is probably a different vendor (the vendor I was working with is no longer in business). It may be worth going through the scenario described above next time this happens to see if the connection is then resolved. If it is it may be what Jim Cobane opined or it may be the vendor does not recognize when their partner has gone away and there may be an adjustment they can make.

Of course all of the above assumes no firewalls, VPNs, etc. are in between.

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 30+ years Cloverleaf, 60 years IT – old fart.

[Russ Ross]

We have a couple of outbound interfaces configured as a server instead of client.

We try to avoid this configuration and only do it when necessary.

I haven’t done it for fail-over reasons like you described.

We ended up using some sort of network aliasing for fail-over issues like you described or in extrme cases reconfigure or recycle the interface after fail-over.

Restricted vendor design has been the reason I have configured outbound interfaces as a server once in a rare occasion.

Another concern not mention is that wihtout additional checking as to what IP is connecting to Cloverleaf, you can’t be sure who is consuming your outbound messages from Cloverleaf.

A common problem incurred with this design is to accedentally end up having the vendor test system consuming your data from your production feed through no fault of your own because they are now in control.

Russ Ross
RussRoss318@gmail.com

[Author]

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