Software Distributor Administration Guide (March 2009)

B.2.5 Connection Timeouts and Other WAN Problems
Low-throughput, wide-area networks can cause SD-UX to encounter time-out problems
when establishing and maintaining network connections with remote agents on other
systems.
If you see the following messages:
ERROR:A Remote Procedure Call to a daemon has failed.
Could not start a management session for <target>.
Make sure the host is accessible from the network, and
that its daemon, swagentd, is running. If the daemon is
running see the daemon logfile on this target for more information.
or
ERROR: Could not perform the requested operation for
<target>, possibly due to a network communications
failure. Check that the host is still accessible from
the network.
and you have verified that the system is up and the daemon program (swagentd) is
running on it, it may be that network delays are causing the connection to time-out.
Resolution
Increase the time-out value used by SD-UX when performing Remote Procedure Calls
(RPCs) by specifying a higher value for the rpc_timeout option, either via the
command line or in the defaults file. RPC time-out values range from 0 to 9, with 9
being the longest time-out. The default RPC time-out value is 5. Note that these values
do not represent any specific time units. See Appendix A (page 299) for more information
on the rpc_timeout option.
Increasing the rpc_timeout can also help in situations where the target agents in an
install or copy session are timing out when trying to contact the source agent. This
problem is indicated by the following error messages in the agent log file:
ERROR: Could not open remote depot/root <path> due to
an RPC or network I/O error.
ERROR: Cannot open source. Check above for errors, as
well as the daemon logfile on the source host (default
location:/var/adm/sw/swagentd.log).
ERROR: Cannot continue the Analysis Phase until the
previous errors are corrected.
Another factor that can affect RPC timeouts on a slow network is the choice of network
protocol. SD-UX supports both UDP- and TCP-based communication (the default is
TCP). TCP communication is more reliable on a WAN because it is connection-based.
SD will fall back to a UDP connection if the TCP connection fails for some reason. The
default binding can be set with the -x rpc_binding_info option.
Note that the daemon program (swagentd) listens for both UDP- and TCP-based RPCs
by default. See Appendix A (page 299) for more information on the rpc_binding_info
option.
338 Troubleshooting