Unexpected error - App Portal receives (“The server is not operational”)

[RenanHammo]

Hello,

Recently, we have had an issue when the App Portal receives (“The server is not operational”), This is an LDAP error that one normally sees when you can’t connect to the domain.  For example, when the domain controller that you’re trying to connect to is down.  

Our successful test bind to an AD object in the same domain from the same server shows that the default domain controller for this server can be connected to.  This suggests that App Portal may be attempting to connect to a different domain controller.  The log file does not show that.  

The root cause of this was that the App Portal system was configured to connect to a specific Global Catalog Domain Controller ('XYZ').  That DC was decommissioned on the day we started seeing the error on the AppPortal UI.  That was recorded in the GC setting in the WD_AppSettings table.

Resolution

The resolution was to run the following SQL command, replacing ‘new-gc-server-host-name’ with a Global Catalog DC DNS name.

UPDATE wdas

SET wdas.Value = 'new-gc-server-host-name'

FROM WD_AppSettings wdas

WHERE wdas.KeyName = 'GC'

This setting is hidden from the UI and normally defaults to the DOMAIN NAME.  e.g. "ABCD.internal".   

I think that in principle we should be able to default it to the DOMAIN rather than the hostname of a specific Global Catalog server.   Can I get confirmation Flexera community on this?

Cheers,

Renan

[jdempsey]

Yes, you can configure this to just the domain name, and App Portal will find a global catalog server for that domain. Keep in mind that if you have a global presence with global catalog servers in different regions over slow connections, it is possible that App Portal could connect to one of those other servers, which would cause the site to run very slowly and could even encounter timeouts. One solution to this would be if you have a few GC servers in close proximity to your App Portal server, you could put them behind a load balanced DNS entry and use that DNS entry in App Portal. That way App Portal would try to bind to that name and the load balancer would return one of those local GCs. If one gets retired or goes offline, one of the others should respond.