Time Travel & Websphere Node/Deployment manager synchronisation

I have websphere 6.x ND servers which time travel in future i.e 2011/2012.  One of machine time traveled to 2011, I then had to revert it back to current date i.e 2010. I can now see that configuration under following directories is not updated properly.

DMGR : Aug 5 2010 is the latest.

[was@Server1 Profile01]$ ls -l profiles/Profile01/dmgr/config/cells/Server1_Cell/nodes/Server1_Node01
total 136
-rw-rw-r– 1 was was   818 Aug  5 16:23 trust.p12
-rw-rw-r– 1 was was  3474 Aug  5 16:23 key.p12
-rw-rw-r– 1 was was 12552 Aug  3 13:24 serverindex.xml

[was@Server1 ~]$ ls -lrt profiles/Profile01/Node/config/cells/Server1_Cell/nodes/Server1_Node01
total 136
-rw-rw-r– 1 was was  2042 Aug 13  2011 trust.p12
-rw-rw-r– 1 was was  2770 Aug 13  2011 key.p12
-rw-rw-r– 1 was was 12552 Aug 15  2011 serverindex.xml

How does Deployment manager syncs Nodes with it’s new configuration?

In order for synchronization to work, the system clocks of the Deployment Manager, and Node Agent machines must be within a specific time range. Otherwise, the attempt to synchronize will fail, and you will get a message indicating that the time difference is too great.

If you have more than 5 min difference between dmgr and node. And you have admin security enabled. Then you will see LTPA token expiration errors…. While communicating with the Deployment Manager, the Node agent for example sync or discover process.

Where will I get this error message?

Yes.  The Deployment Manager is the one that attempts the synchronization with the node agents, so the status messages (i.e., success/failure) would be in the DM logs.

I often get too many file entries left at wstemp and temp directories under NodeAgent/Dmgr. They are failed sync files and would like to know if I can delete them.

WebSphere Application Server and config temp files

• The node sends a sync request to cell (dmgr)
• The cell manager identifies the modified documents, copies them to the temp folder (config/temp) and then sends the response to node with the URLs of modified documents.
• The node then uses the File Transfer service to download the documents to local machine.
• The file transfer service internally sets a flag that enables the file transfer server to delete the temp file once the download is complete.

Whenever there is a request to transfer a file, the dmgr creates a temp copy in the config/temp directory. <Install_Root>\config\temp\cells\<cell_name>\applications\ .

• The dmgr deletes the temp copy only when the file is completely read and copied to the client.
• The temp files get deleted only when the download process is complete and successful.

Why does dmgr/nodeagent use temp directories? Is there any reason for it?

The wstemp directory is where workspaces (save areas) are created when someone begins the process of changing a configuration in a node.
The wstemp directory is the workspace directory.  Any program that ask the workspace for a session (e.g. adminconsole and wsadmin)  a directory will be created.  If the session is not cleaned up
the directories will remain.  For wsadmin, the completion of wsadmin will clean the directory, note if you kill or wsadmin fails to work and crash, the folder will remain (these have script in the folder
name).

For adminconsole, each user will have their own folder. These folders will always remain because we maintain user preference during their sessions.  Also if the user does not logout, we keeps all configuration changes in this folder.  Once they log out, the user folder will be reduced to contain the minimum preference information for the next session login. You can remove all these files/folders and the dmgr will create new files (we highly recommmend stopping the dmgr before deleting these so users logged in don’t have errors).

These folders contain temporary files and can be manually deleted.  Websphere will automatically manage these files and if they are growing later, something is wrong because users are killing/not logging out.

Hers is a reference document which helps to understand and to debug the problems with wstemp workspace directories which contains workspace  directories named with ‘anonymousxxxx’ and ‘ Scriptxxxx’ .

Problem with workspace directories when created in wstemp directory
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21221297

More reading

IBM – WebSphere Application Server synchronization process explained
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=180&uid=swg21233075

IBM – What is file synchronization and how does it work?
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=180&uid=swg21108407