Upgraded SAM server but brcontrol does not work

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance
• Network Observability

Issue/Introduction

• After upgrading the Smarts SAM server (e.g., to V25.4.6.0), the brcontrol utility fails to connect to the broker. The following error is displayed in the terminal:

     [bin]# ./brcontrol
     [Date/Time] t@712092544 <Primary Thread>
     AUTH-E-ENOTAUTHENTICATED-Unable to authenticate 
     Error attaching to broker: [IP_ADDRESS]:426!

• Despite the error, other services like sm_service show may indicate that Smarts processes (RabbitMQ, Tomcat, SAM server, etc.) are running correctly.

Environment

All supported releases of Smarts

Cause

The issue occurs because critical connection configuration files in the local configuration directory are either missing or were corrupted (set to 0 bytes) during the upgrade process. This prevents the broker from authenticating the brcontrol request.

Specifically, the following files in SAM_BASEDIR/local/conf are affected:

• serverConnect.conf
• clientConnect.conf
• brokerConnect.conf

Resolution

To resolve this issue, restore the corrupted or missing configuration files from a known good backup and restart all the Smarts services.