Bind EMS Listener To Loopback Interface...

[Lee Harris_5]

Howdy...

Forgive me if I get this mixed up...my understanding of ISEE / EMS is fairly limited, but here goes...

We've had a problem with ISEE on a number of our servers. After speaking to HP about it and doing some investigation of our own it seems that there is an issue which arises if you make unsolicited connections to TCP port 1402 (the EMS Listerner port).

According to HP this port is used by ISEE to listen for EMS events. When an EMS event occurs, it sends the details to TCP port 1402 where ISEE picks it up and processes it.

The problem we've seen on a certain version of ISEE is that if for example I make numerous telnet connections to this port, ISEE generates alerts with an error of "Error trying to process and EMS event." In other words, it thinks EMS has tried to tell it something but it couldn't understand what.

So, in light of this, what I want to know is...

Can I bind the EMSListener to only listen on the loopback interface. At present it listens on all interfaces, as shown by the output from the netstat -an command...

Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address (state)
tcp 0 0 *.1402 *.* LISTEN

I am thinking that binding the listerner to the loopback interface will stop it answering connection requests from anywhere but the actual server. Which should help stop our problem.

Does anyone know if this can be done?

[Liem Nguyen]

Hi,

What is your ISEE version? I've tried multiple telnet to port 1402 but unable to generate the same incident on my ISEE 3.90.872.

[Lee Harris_5]

Yes, on machines which we upgraded to A.03.90.872 the problem does not seem to occur. On older versions though (namely A.03.00.030) we have seen this problem. In the long term the plan would be to upgrade all clients, but as we have something like 400 servers, this will probably take a while to achieve. So in the short term, binding the emsListener to the loopback would be the preferred work around for the time being.

[Liem Nguyen]

Lee,

I think the best solution would be to upgrade all Servers to the current version. ISEE version 3.00 is no longer supported. HP will only support two most current versions which are 3.50 and 3.90.

Regards,

[Lee Harris_5]

I received confirmation from HP that there is no way to bind the EMSlistener to a specific network interface although this has aparently been put in as an enhancement request for a subsequent release...