XBIS and Server 2012 Essentials

Tony, while mine is an unofficial opinion, a quick look at Microsoft's comparison chart reveals nothing that I think would prevent XBIS from installing. and running.

Hi Tony:

Server 2012 Essentials or Server 2012 R2 Essentials will work fine.  Foundation should also work, although we have not tried that.

Be sure to configure the IIS prerequisites that the BIS installer requires -- for example, metabase compatibility. The installation UI is quite a bit different from desktop systems but the same options are there.

Thanks for the confirmation - I've ordered the server and hopefully everything will go well!

Thanks, Tom - while unofficial, it carries much weight.  I've ordered the server, hopefully everything will go well.  Essentials looks like it could be a good solution for some of our smaller customers who don't have in-house IT staff.

We installed the new server with Windows 2012 Essentials, with IIS and xBIS (Acu version), and most everything works well - it was easy to set up, no major hassles, performance is excellent.

We have one oddity - intermittently, we will receive an error "Service denied; server restriction(s) exceeded" when we access an srf file.  The same srf will be accessible from other computers on the network. If we wait a while, we will then be able to access the .srf successfully again.

Checking system logs and IIS logs hasn't helped much - it is unclear whether this error is being thrown by BIS or IIS.  Can anyone shed light on whether this specific error text is coming from xBIS, and if so, what triggers it?

Thanks

Tony

Assuming that you are using web services, be sure that the BIS logs indicate that you are shutting down the instance of the service correctly (so that the session is torn down immediately) so that the same user is not starting another session while you are waiting for a session to time out..  Other than that, all I can imagine is that you are somehow hitting a usage limit within the operating system/IIS.  

Hi, Tom - thanks for the quick response.  Yes, we are using web services, as you assumed.  When checking the BIS log, I do see "Page Rendering Complete: service program terminating, session destroyed!" at the end of the Acu trace file, so it seems the session is being terminated.

We still have our application installed on the older Win2008R2 server, and we don't see the same behaviour, which made me think it is related to Server 2012 and/or 2012 Essentials.  The behaviour is odd - if we restart IIS, the first application from a workstation to access the web service will work, but the second application will throw the error.  For example, from my PC, SoapUI is able to access the web services just fine, but if I access the .srf through a browser, it throws the error. If we restart IIS, and I use the browser first, from my PC, then that continues to work, and SoapUI will throw the error.

Hi Tony - I just scanned our source code, and the error message IS coming from XBIS. I'm hoping someone on our XBIS Dev team will respond (and I'm out on vacation today thru Monday). However, it appears to be in a section of code dealing with how XBIS is licensed (LAN vs. WAN) and the IP address the request is coming from. Is the affected requesting computer on a different IP subnet than those that succeed?

If this is what is happening, then it can be seen in the IIS access logs.  But Tony claims that this is happening on a subsequent request from the same client machine...

In fact, the new server IS on a different domain in our network, but it is on the same subnet.

The problem is not that certain computers cannot connect - it is that different applications, from the same workstation (same IP) do not all work.  For example, one of our developers is doing web page development on his local PC.  If he uses SoapUI to check a web service from his PC, that will work fine.  Then, he makes a change to the web page, and the web page (actually, the Ruby backend) cannot connect to the web service, from his computer.  The SoapUI connection continues to work - from the same computer.

If we restart IIS on the server2012 box, and he then uses the web page to access the BIS web service, that will work - but then SoapUI, from the same computer, will NOT work.  It seems that the first application to access the BIS web service, from a particular computer, WILL work, but other applications, from the same computer (same IP), will not.

Thanks

The problem was I forgot to put in the WAN license for BIS when we installed it on the new server.  Once I did that, the problem went away.

However, the behaviour is not what I would have expected - it seems odd that requests from outside the domain would work for the first application from a specific IP, but not for subsequent applications from that same IP address.  Something different with 2012 Essentials, perhaps?

Hi Tony:

What version of ACU-GT and BIS are you running?  Is it exactly the same installed version on 2008R2 and 2012R2?

It does sound like a LAN vs. WAN licensing issue.  

The ACUCOBOL-GT version of BIS doesn't know what kind of license is available until the first time a COBOL program is run.  After that, for LAN licenses, it binds to the subnet where the first request originated, and denies service for requests coming from other subnets. It might be possible that the particular version of BIS you are running services the initial WAN request even with a LAN license while the license is being examined -- I dimly recall that kind of issue.  In any case, this has all been revised in the upcoming version, which also provides much improved tracing for such licensing issues, including a trace line recording the network binding that was established by the first request.

If you believe there is still an issue, please send me trace files in a private message and I'll happily take a look.