The 306 and 307 comm errors

Products

• CA Harvest Software Change Manager - OpenMake Meister
• CA Harvest Software Change Manager

Issue/Introduction

When trying to connect to the SCM Harvest broker, you may sometimes get a “-306” or “-307” communication error. Understanding these error codes will help you resolve the problem more quickly.

 

Environment

CA Harvest SCM all versions, all platforms

Resolution

The “-306” comm error generally means the Harvest SCM client component (Workbench, Administrator Tool, Command Line utility, plugin or Harweb) cannot find the broker (or agent) machine and/or connect to the port - either the client machine is not connected to the network, broker (or agent) host name does not resolve to the correct IP address, the client cannot connect across the network to the broker (or agent) machine (unreachable), or a firewall is blocking the port.

Things to check:

• From the client machine, can you ping the broker machine and get a reply back?
• From the client machine, if telnet or putty is available, can you telnet to the SCM Broker or Agent port number?  (the broker port number is normally 5101)
• Compare the IP Address returned by the ping command on the client machine with the actual IP address returned by using the “ipconfig” or “ifconfig” command on the broker or agent machine.
• You might check to see if an entry for the broker or agent machine is found in the client machine’s hosts file (“C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\host” or “/etc/hosts”), and if so, is the IP address found there correct

The “-307” comm error generally means the Harvest SCM client component (Workbench, Administrator Tool, Command Line utility, plugin or Harweb) can find the broker machine and the port is open, but the broker is down or is known by a different name.

Things to check:

• On the broker machine, check the list of running processes on the computer to see if you find one “bkrd” or “bkrd.exe” process, one “rtserver” or “rtserver.exe” process, and one or more “hserver” or “hserver.exe” processes (Task Manager on Windows, “ps -ef” command on Linux or Unix)
• On the broker machine, check the environment variables to see if there is one named “RT_FORCE_NODE_NAME”.  (On the Linux and Unix platforms you will need to check the profile of the userid that is used to start the “bkrd” process).  If an RT_FORCE_NODE_NAME environment variable is found, the Harvest SCM Client will need to use this value as the "broker name" when connecting to the Harvest SCM Broker, and the client machine will need to be able to resolve this value to the IP address for the Harvest SCM Broker machine (normally accomplished by either an "alias" entry in the DNS directory or by an entry in the "hosts" file on the client machine)

Additional Information

More information on configuring communications between the Harvest SCM Broker and Clients can be found here: Configure Broker and Server Communication

If the issue is seen in the new Harvest Broker server, check the system resources to ensure they are sufficient.

A convenient Powershell command that can be used to test if a port is open is this one:

$t = New-Object System.Net.Sockets.TcpClient 'my.hostname', 123; if($t.Connected) {"OK"}

... Replace 'my.hostname' with the hostname of the target computer, and 123 with the port number to test.

Returns OK or an error message.

If the error is due to the use of the RT_FORCE_NODE_NAME environment variable, this article might be helpful: ERROR: Could not resolve node name _node where RT_FORCE_NODE_NAME is not working