Failed to initialize TCP server socket: Socket error:9999

Products

• CA Single Sign On Secure Proxy Server (SiteMinder)
• CA Single Sign On SOA Security Manager (SiteMinder)
• CA Single Sign-On

Issue/Introduction

We are trying to start our new Policy Server, but after some seconds it is going down. When reviewing the smps.log we do see the following error:

[3327/140582757984][Mon Jul 02 2018 04:30:35][CServer.cpp:8629][ERROR][sm-Server-01660] Failed to initialize TCP server socket: Socket error:9999
[3327/140582757984][Mon Jul 02 2018 04:30:35][CServer.cpp:6923][ERROR][sm-Server-03470] TCP port initialization failure

What is this error and how we can solve this issue?
 

Environment

Policy Server R12.8 on RHEL7

Resolution

This error occurs when the Policy Server process cannot open the sockets needed to start the process. Usually this happens because the TCP ports are already taken by another process.

This can happen if there is already another Policy Server process running using the same ports, which could be a stale process that was never shut down properly, or if you stopped and started the service too quickly, but also if there are problems in the OS network layer, or another process which already took the TCP ports.

Restarting the server usually solves this issue.