Siteminder lessons learned

Issues

• Siteminder message bus is failing to initialize errors in event viewer
• Page loads hanging and coming back with system cannot find the file specified
• Duplicate LLAWP processes when site is refreshed multiple times within a certain period of time

After hours of double, triple and quadruple checking configuration we finally got to the root cause. I'm no Siteminder guru, but apparently when the agent starts up it gets it base set of configuration from some server defined in the siteminder configuration files. There are also several backup servers that can be used in the event the first one is unavailable. Well, when the first server is unavailable and the timeout is set to something fairly high (e.g. 60 sec) then page loads are slow and siteminder fails to initialize. So, being unable to reach the server was causing these issues. After the policies were changed to point to a server that was accessible, everything was happy.

Lessons Learned

Make absolutely sure all servers can be accessed from the Siteminder agent machine. Even if policy servers defined in the SmHost.conf file can be accessed that doesn't mean the initial configuration can be obtained.