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Chat in a parallel deployment

Wed, 2008-07-30 11:23 — kcallen

We're having a problem getting the group chat to work in our PD. Seem to have stumped both Sungard and BIGIP, the vendor for our load balancer. Apparently, each server in the web tier uses a different port for chat. We have 2 set at ports 9001 and 9002 respectively. What I don't understand is how someone with a session on one server using its chat port could possibly interact with someone with a session on the other server using its (different) port.

Has anyone gotten chat to work in a PD? If so, where are we going wrong?

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Thu, 2008-08-21 10:57 — macmpb

Same problem

We are having the same problem at the moment. We have firewalls between all our servers and we don't know how chat communicates in order to open up the correct ports between the servers.

Has anyone had this problem before and how did you work around it? Any help would be great.

Wed, 2008-09-10 05:57 — macmpb

More Info on Chat

We were advised by SunGard that chat opens a java app on the users browser that connects to a particular port. The ports are defined by:
configman -g grouptools.chat.port

Tue, 2008-09-16 13:42 — kcallen

Follow up

Turns out that the load balancer was not configured correctly. The chat ports had to be set specifically for Layer 4 session persistence. BTW, the ability to do Layer 4 persistence is the spec that MUST be met by a load balancer to make it usable in a Luminis PD deployment. (We learned that the hard way.)

Tue, 2008-09-16 19:17 — Jason

Hrm.

I was told that layer 7 and cookie persistence was the way the application held sessions...

So layer 4 sticky/persistence for chat ports, and cookies/7 for the general web session?

Also, if it is the client that makes the request to say, 9001, a chat port, that hits the Load balancer, I assume that the chat message hits the particular backend server assigned to 9001, then that server must send out a message to all the other clients in that chatroom?

Say you have the following people:

client A: on server 1, chat port 9001.
client B: on server 2, chat port 9002.

Both in a chatroom.

Client A sends a chat message to the 'room', that is a message sent to 9001 on the load balancer. 9001 is assigned to server 1. Then I guess that server 1 knows somehow that a person on server 2 is in the room, and sends, on behalf of the client A, a message to server 2 at 9002?

Or does the client java applet automatically send to all chat ports by default just to cover its bases?

Either way I'm having a hard time seeing what needs to be layer 4 sticky, if the session is maintained from client to server with a cookie, fos.server.cookie.