FTA Manager problems

Bhicks31

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Join Date
Jun 2012
Location
Carrollton KY
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We have built a VM machine and also a built a sever that we did a rehost of our concurrent licenses to. The licenses resided on the server on the business side of our firewall. The VM resided on the mfg side of the firewall. All the AB ports have been opened up for communication between the firewall. On my workstation i can see and use all the activations on the server as can other people with the software installed. The problem is we can not get the VM FTA manager to see the activations. We have tried a ton of different things with no sucess. The one thing we keep seeing in the logs is flexsvr machine is down or not responding yet we can see and use the activations on all other machines just not the vm. Here is another error we keep seeing in the logs to FLEXnet Licensing error:-96,491. Any ideas on something to try and get this working. We have unistalled FTA Manager and installed it several times. We have built new vm machines and even tried a actaull box on the mfg side of the firewall and all have the same problems. Has anyone seen this or have any ideas what to try. Thanks.
 
Last edited:
Welcome to the Forum !

Let me try summarizing:

All of my workstations can successfully communicate with a computer running FactoryTalk Activation Manager (as an FTA Server) through a firewall that separates our enterprise and manufacturing networks.

However, one Virtual Machine that we have configured cannot access the FTA Server.

FTA uses TCP Port 27000, so the first thing I'd do is use Eli Fulkerson's TCPING utility to verify that you can use Port 27000 between the Virtual Machine and the FTA Server.

If that works, then we're going to have to start digging into the guts of the Virtual Machine (VMWare ? Workstation, Server, ESX ? Bridged or NAT networking ?) and the virtual network adapters.
 
Thanks for summerizing that up. Just wanted to give as much info as i could. Our IT department tells us the ports are open they have opened up 27000-27009 and have verified there is traffic. I will get that program installed sometime this afternoon to verify that there is traffic between the server and VM.
 
Wait, wait, wait.

Please add information in new posts; Editing is for fixing spelling or format errors.

You added that you "built new vm machines and even tried a actual box on the mfg side of the firewall and all have the same problems."

When you originally posted that "On my workstation I can see and use all the activations on the server as can other people with the software installed", are those computers on the Business side of the firewall or on the Manufacturing side of the firewall ?

I assumed that because you were focusing on the Virtual Machine that physical computers were successfully navigating the firewall.

If both physical computers and Virtual Machines on the Manufacturing side of the firewall cannot contact the FTA Server on the Business side, then it makes sense to me that the problem is in the firewall and not in the Virtual Machine or in the FTA Client.
 
Just to follow up it did end up being the firewall. We had opened all the ports for the lmgrd 27000-27009 but flevsvr uses a much larger range of dynamic ports that we had to open up as well. Thanks for you help Ken Roach!
 
Thanks for the followup !

Do you know exactly what that larger range of TCP ports was ? I was only familiar with TCP Port 27000.
 
Yes after several hours of dealing with the Rockwell Support we found out that the Flexsvr using 1024-65535 range of ports. However we were told that it will pick just one of those ports and once it establishes communication with the activation server it will always use that port, unless for some reason it takes to long for the port to open or something else is using the port. The VM node we built was very slow, network being the bottle neck. So it was so slow that that the FTA Manager kept jumping ports and we could never lock it down to a single port. In our other plants with better networks we have opened only the single port that the flexsvr used and have had no problems. This plant being on a slow network we had to open the whole range of ports for the time being.
 
Yes it is and we will be going back to close them once the speed of this particular machine has been increased. Right now with the slow response of the network the ports are jumping around to much to try and lock it down.
 
But you should be able to define the range of ports into a tighter group than that. That is just plain stupid coding on rockwells behalf.

Things like this are what cause systems to be hacked.
 
I just wanted to add a reply to this with an updated answer from Rockwell's tech support:

The following need to be permitted within the Firewall and Antivirus software rules:
TCP Ports 27000-27009
TCP Port 54967 (Helper Service)
TCP Port 16165
C:\Program Files (x86)\Rockwell Software\FactoryTalk Activation\Flexsvr.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Rockwell Software\FactoryTalk Activation\LMGRD.exe
 

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