Messaging gateway console commands fail with parser error

Products

• Messaging Gateway

Issue/Introduction

When attemting to run some commands from the Symantec Messaging Gateway (SMG) command line interface (CLI), the command fails with a an error indicating that an invalid token is present.

vm-sbg> monitor

not well-formed (invalid token) at line 1249, column 63, byte 69548 at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/i386-linux-thread-multi/XML/Parser.pm line 187

Cause

This is caused by the presence of non-UTF-8 characters in the scanner configuration file. These characters are most likely part of a content filtering notification which has been carried forward from a previous release. Changes to the xml parser used by CLI commands resulted in the parser being being more strict with respect to xml well formedness. 

Resolution

Later releases of SMG will clean up non-UTF-8 character data when it is imported or exported into the control center. The solution to this issue is to back up policy data and then restore that backup. Doing so will cause the SMG control center to clean up the invalid characters during the restore process.

1. Log into the control center as a full administrator or backup administator
2. Create a policy backup from the Administration->Version->Backup page
3. Select "Backup Now", "Custom Backup", "Policies Only", "Store Backup on Server", and then click "Backup Now"
4. When the backup is complete, click the "Restore/Download" tab
5. Ensure that the policy backup is checked in "Available Backups" and click "Restore"

Applies To

• Messaging Gateway 10.0.x