Who knew that my Cisco VPN could crash Arc Server 10.1?

[DavidPlume1]

Hi Everyone,

I've recently installed Server Enterprise 10.1 on my Windows 7 machine and have had a heck of a time keeping the services running.

My installation went smoothly.  Once started I checked my permissions for the arcgis user and was able to start the Server Manager fine.

Things went downhill from there.  As soon as I begin interacting with the server I began to get messages like:

Failed to start the server machine...Required port 4000 already in use.

I checked that port using netstat -ao and found the port was in use ... by a process owned by the arcgis server user.

I tried starting and stopping the service but then found that subsequent tries at starting the server manager failed completely the site was not available.

I did find that rebooting would re-expose the site but subsequent interactions with the site would crash the services.

Finally I recalled having problems with our Cisco VPN crashing the my license manager a few months ago. Sure enough, I found that if I turned off my VPN the Server started to work -- well at least until this writing.  I've not fully exercised it but was able to publish an arcmap service.

I'm writing this partly for the record and to ask -- has anyone else out there had compatibility problems between your VPN (or similar) and server?

Thanks in advance
David

[BubbaHey]

I've seen a lot of problems with VPN and, in particular, License Manager. There are a number of bugs on this.

[TomMagdaleno]

Very interesting.  I found this searching for a solution to a problem and we have a similar setup.  My services stop responding when I overwrite them.

[MichaelD_Aprix]

Earlier this week I had to use ArcMap/ArcCatalog for a project but every time I opened the programs they would crash.  I spent hours trying to figure out why my ArcMap/ArcCatalog would crash on start up.  It had worked perfectly fine for almost a year, I tried every single suggestion, updated everything, deleting specific things, then rebooting and that's when I noticed it.   I thought it had worked because of one of the updates but it turns out that I had just not connected to my university's network yet.  It worked fine until I did so and the programs crashed immediately.  Is this a known problem that the Arc suite has troubles with VPNs?  It seems like a serious problem and it was incredibly stressful to figure out.

[BubbaHey]

Michael, I have seen this problem if using concurrent use licenses and license manager. Not sure if that is your case, but if it is, look at this bug.  Usually increasing FLEXLM_TIMEOUT helps.

See this bug:

Bug NIM-053680
http://support.esri.com/en/bugs/nimbus/TklNMDUzNjgw

[MichaelVolz]

This is an old thread, but did the issues with ArcGIS usage through a VPN (specifically Cisco) ever get resolved?

[DavidPlume1]

Michael,

Thanks for the follow-up. It seems to me that we never really worked out a complete understanding of the situation. I think I posted it partly for the sake of the community.

At any rate, we muddled our way through. Please feel free to update/delete this post as is most appropriate.

David

David Plume | Web Mapping Apps, Solutions Programmer and Spatial Analyst

Cell: 303.437.7977

David.Plume@tetratech.com<mailto:David.Plume@tetratech.com>

Tetra Tech

216 16th St., Denver CO 80202

PLEASE NOTE: This message, including any attachments, may include confidential and/or inside information. Any distribution or use of this communication by anyone other than the intended recipient is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender by replying to this message and then delete it from your system.

P Think Green - Not every email needs to be printed.

[JustinRodriguez]

Hello,
VPNs often have their own firewall rules. Here are the ports that must be opened for ArcGIS for Server:
http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//015400000537000000

Ensure you speak with your Network Admin and have these appropriate rules set. Thanks-

Justin Rodriguez