Software Distributor (SD-UX) Administration Guide HP-UX 11i v1, 11i v2, and 11i v3 (762797-001, March 2014)

NOTE: This option should be set to true only when network bandwidth is clearly restricting total
throughput. If this option is used with a fast network or with a depot server simultaneously connected
to many target hosts, this option can actually reduce overall throughput or performance, unless the
source depot is already compressed.
If it is not clear that this option will help in your situation, compare the throughput of a few install
or copy tasks (both with and without compression) before changing this option value.
See Chapter 8: “Reliability and Performance ” (page 133) for more information about performance
options.
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 227) 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 227) for more information on the rpc_binding_info option.
A final WAN-related issue may arise when using the interactive GUI. During the analysis and
execution phases of an interactive session, each target agent is periodically polled for up-to-date
status information. The polling_interval option can be used to control the number of seconds
that elapse between successive status polls of a given target system. On networks where even this
minor data transfer is a problem, you can increase this polling interval, thus decreasing the frequency
258 Troubleshooting