How should I go about choosing a Harvest port range?
Article ID: 41709
Updated On:
Products
Issue/Introduction
As the Harvest administrator I understand that Harvest by default installation uses port 5101 and the Ephemeral ports for all client and agent SCM requests to the server, however I wish to establish a direct connect port range to avoid the use of Ephemeral ports which can be unreliable within our network. So how do I go about picking the proper port quantity and the port range to use?
Environment
CA Harvest SCM all versions
Resolution
First to decide the port quantity, you need to know the number of Harvest agents installed on the network, secondly you should have a good idea of the client volume that is logged into the Harvest system on a daily basis concurrently, then as a precaution you should add about 10% to that number. You can run the Command Line hgetusg to obtain the volume of concurrent clients logged into the system or a better alternative is to download and use HLoginMon utility that provides continuous real time matrix display and count of the logged in clients (this utility is available on the Harvest public community forum under the tag 'HLoginMon' or visit TEC1070559). Observing this volume during the course of a normal business day or days should provide you with a good idea of the count that you need. In some customer cases, this number has been upwards of 200~300. As I said, add this number to the number of online agents with a slight over percentage and you should have a solid port quantity to use.
Once you have a choice of the quantity of the ports to establish, now you should determine what the port range should be. To get a better understanding of port numbers and ranges that are already assigned, you should review the IANA list on the Internet. A good place for that is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TCP_and_UDP_port_numbers
This list shows that the best port range of "Undefined Dynamic and/or Private Ports are those from 49152 through 65535".
After you have decided on the port range for the Harvest system, you should inform your network administer of this port range so that they can officially designate that port range as reserved for Harvest within your domain and insure that these ports including port 5101 are opened on any firewall between the server machine and the clients and agent boxes.
Additional Information
Port 5101 should be left out side of the designated direct connect port range as defined in your rtserver.cm file in order to prevent port communication contention. Also the max number of HServers defined in your HBroker.arg should not exceed the number of ports in your port range.
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