How to speed up connection between Translation Manager, Universe Designer and CMS

[raphael_branger]

At a recent customer project my teammate and I were facing an issue with importing Webi documents and universes into Translation Manager (all on BO4.1 SP4) getting the following error message:

org.apache.axis2.AxisFault: Unable to find servers in CMS, servers could be down or disabled by the administrator (FWN 01014)

There is a KB article describing this error and a solution: http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1879675

One hand we followed the instructions in the KB article and specified the hostname for each server. Although our server is multihomed (that means has more than one network interfaces) we didn't thought about this before hand because the second network interface goes into a backup LAN and is never used for communication with e.g. the client tools. In addition everything worked fine so far - until we got the issue with Translation Manager. Still, just setting the hostname was not enough. On the server side there is the Windows firewall enabled, therefore we had to assign static request ports to several services. We already did so before our issue with the Translation Manager for the CMS, Input & Output FRS, all Webi Processing Server. We used TCPView to analyze on which ports Translation Manager was opening connections. As long as there were requests on ports which we didn't specify in the CMC (some random port number e.g. 56487) we narrowed down all the services which Translation Manager establishes a connection. We had to specify a port for all of the following servers:

• The Adaptive Processing Server (APS) hosting the DSL-Bridge Service
• The APS hosting the Client Auditing Proxy Service
• The APS hosting the Search Index Service
• The APS hosting the Translation Service
• The WACS (Web Application Container Server)

Besides the issue with Translation Manager we had another issue with creating new universe connections in the Universe Design Tool. When creating a new connection we had to wait up to 30 minutes ( ! ) to get to the wizard page where you can select from the list of available database drivers. Still, after 30 minutes everything worked fine and could create the connection successfully. Based on our experience with Translation Manager we run again TCPView and found that we need to assign a port number to both connection servers (32 and 64 bit) in CMC. Having done this, creating a new connection now works without any waiting time.

After all: If you have firewalls between your BO server and client tools, just assign a port to all servers available and open the port on the firewall (the only exception might be for the Event Server as I'm really not aware of any communication between this server and a component outside the BO server)