Cisco ACE GSS 4400 Series Global Site Selector Appliances

Revised February 18, 2005

January 21, 2005

Products Affected

Problem Description

A system timer in GSS software versions 1.1(1.4.0) and earlier, and 1.2(1.0.3) and earlier, used for calculating keepalive transmission intervals, becomes unreliable after 24 days of uptime. As a result of the timer unreliability, keepalives may fail, but the failure may be undetected by the GSS, which would result in the GSS reporting incorrect keepalive statuses.

Background

A system timer in GSS software versions 1.1(1.4.0) and earlier, and 1.2(1.0.3) and earlier, used for calculating keepalive transmission intervals, becomes unreliable after 24 days of uptime. If certain events occur after 24 days then keepalive detection may not accurately reflect status of keepalive targets. This failure may not be obvious, and may not be reported by the GSS.

Manual events may include:

• Use of the gss stop and gss start commands

• Use of the gss restart command

• Infrequent creation or modification of keepalive

• Iinfrequent suspension/activation of keepalive

Automatic events may include:

• Failure and automatic restart of the keepalive process

• Failure and automatic restart of the GSS subsystems, such as due to some other system defect, possibly unknown

All keepalive types are potentially affected, including ICMP, TCP, HTTP-HEAD, KAL-AP, CRA, NS and Shared keepalives.

Following a keepalive process restart, keepalives may fail to be transmitted. The keepalive process may restart automatically due to gss fault detection processing or due to user CLI commands such as gss stop / gss start, gss restart . How the keepalive process was restarted does not affect the failure. It is the fact that the keepalive process restarted which may cause the problem.

When the keepalive process restarts, it may initialize itself is such a way that the internal timers malfunction, depending on the length of system uptime. If this malfunction occurs, the keepalive process will fail to transmit keepalives, and fail to set keepalive status correctly.

Problem Symptoms

If the GSS has an uptime of greater than 24 days, has had a Keepalive restart, either manual or automatic, and is running GSS software version 1.1(1.4.0) and earlier or GSS software version 1.2(1.0.3) and earlier, then one or more keepalives exhibit any of these behaviors:

• Keepalive status incorrect

• Keepalive remains in OFFLINE or ONLINE state indefinitely

• Keepalive status inconsistent between GSSs in a GSS network

• Keepalive statistics not incrementing at CLI or GUI

• Keepalive packets not being transmitted

• Keepalive packet transmission interval incorrect

Workaround/Solution

Cisco recomends that the GSS be upgraded to version 1.2(1.1.2) or 1.1(1.5.1), which are currently available at the following location: http://www.cisco.com/pcgi-bin/tablebuild.pl/gss-3des

If the GSS cannot be upgraded for some reason, then the workaround is to reboot every 24 days or less until a version of software with a fix for this defect is installed. To reboot use the CLI reload command. The commands gss stop and gss start or gss restart are not sufficient.

DDTS

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For More Information

If you require further assistance, or if you have any further questions regarding this field notice, please contact the Cisco Systems Technical Assistance Center (TAC) by one of the following methods:

• Open a service request on Cisco.com
• By email
• By telephone

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