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How are IP addresses bound to VU components in SAP Contact Center?

former_member290821
Participant
0 Kudos

Dear Contact Centre Gurus,

I have a problem with my SAP Contact Centre development system following installation of Service Pack 8 (the problem may or may not be related to the Service or could be due to other reasons, though not sure what at this stage). The problem is that the system has lost its locally assigned IP addresses - it came back with them missing following a reboot. The logs report:

INF> Monitoring action failed: HTTP: none of the server addresses are locally assigned. IIS: site check successful

I am trying to work out where/how they are configured and how to get them back into the system.  I've looked at various technical guides, but can't find the one that describes in any kind of detail how Contact Centre binds IPs to VUs. Does anyone have a good description of this anywhere?

If I run ipconfig on the application server, it is not listing any IP other than the IP for the application server itself.  This server has always used DHCP for its main IP and the various VU IPs are set up as A records in our DNS.  On our nicely working IA environment (which is using DHCP also), ipconfig reveals a set of IPs bound to the NIC so the Contact Centre system appears to have (somehow) bound the VU IPs to the network card....  but how and where this happens is a mystery to me at present.

Tracert and various other DNS/DHCP checks have shown the development server to be making all of the appropriate hops to other networks.  It is just on the Contact Centre side that it is not working. I tried setting the server IP statically (rather than using DHCP) and bound the various other VU IPs to the card. This did allow me to get the VU IPs operational but the components aren't working properly still so, although I could open the admin web page and launch the System Configuration tool login, it reported connection problems after I supplied my credentials.

To my knowledge, absolutely nothing has changed on this dev server in terms of its network configuration since around 2013 when it was first setup and it was (apparently) working fine after I first installed SP8 last week.

Any help in troubleshooting this would be very very welcome.  Let me know if you need more information.

I will continue my own investigations in the background and come back here if I more findings.

Many thanks as usual for any assistance.

Best wishes,

Adele

Accepted Solutions (1)

Accepted Solutions (1)

former_member158363
Active Contributor
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Hi Adele,

well, it would be good to know more details about your setup, however, on first sight it looks like a permissions problem. Do you have a different users for loggin into IA and running HAC services? Are they in Active Directory? Maybe the user profile has changed since 2013?

In IA, if you Apply Changes to Local System, it is executed under user you are logged into IA, whereas Apply Changes to Host is executed under HAC's user.

In latte case, I would expect error in HAC log, trying to run the Service Access Point component (allocating the virtual IP address). This is just guess, I have never met such problem, actually.

I would try to do some minor change in VU variable, synchronize instances and apply changes using Host  option.

Please, come back with findings.

Regards,

Dawood.

former_member290821
Participant
0 Kudos

Hello Dawood,

As ever you were on the right track with this. I followed your advice and found that after I had applied changes to Host things all began to kick back into place - the IP addresses reappeared as if by magic...  I still don't quite understand how/where Contact Centre configures these - presumably there's something within the programme that binds the IPs - they don't show on the NIC IPv4 tab but they are there when I run ipconfig /all.

Just for information, we use a single Active Directory user to run everything (except the SQL Server Agent service which has its own service account) - and I tend to log on to the application server with that user (which is Administrator at Windows level and is also Sys Admin on the SQL database server too (separate box to the app server)) and launch IA from there.

I've had various problems with this development server that I won't go into here but I have learnt a lot in troubleshooting them.  Every time I think I understand how Contact Centre works, I learn something that makes me realise that I don't 😐   It is such a complex product requiring a lot of admin-user configuration, much of which I feel ought to be written into the programme and happen automatically.  I completely missed the fact that there are differences between  Apply Changes to Local System and Apply Changes to Host  so thank you for your help once again.

Best wishes,

Adele

former_member158363
Active Contributor
0 Kudos

Hello Adele,

happy to help, good that it worked out! Though from your description I do not exactly understand why it did not worked with Local option - maybe the there is some subtle difference in permissions when creating virtual IPs from background (through HAC service) and frontend (from IA UI).

My advice was kind of IT crowd's expert advice "Have you tried turning it off and on again" but you have just confirmed how powerful this methodology is .

Weird think is what you wrote about the NIC IPv4tab. Just to be on the same page - you should not find the CCtr addresses in the NIC's configuration but in the NIC status - example:

In NIC configuration, only the machine's IP is visible. This is also identifying the NIC for Contact Center. In IA, for each VU, you can bind virtual IP to NIC through element properties under HAC:

So in your case you may have problem, because the address can change with every restart, unless you lease the address from DHCP.

If the Interface field is empty, then CCtr will use the first suitable NIC. Check the documentation here: Element Properties: Address - SAP Contact Center - SAP Library

Regards,

Dawood.

Answers (0)