Contender for the world's worst error message: Connection to CRS failed

I've just spent the afternoon chasing down this error message, trying to connect a Linux cell console client to query a Windows cell manager:

Connection to CRS failed.
To start the Data Protector daemons on the Cell Manager host use the command
omnisv -start on the Cell Manager
or check if the communication between the Cell Manager and client is encrypted with the command
omnicc -encryption -status -all on the Cell Manager.

Everything checked out on the Windows cell manager, and encrypted control was off on all nodes.

I ran strace on omnicc, omnicc -debug 1-200, tcpdump'ed every packet from the Linux system in question (there were none) and tried omnicc -server 1.2.3.4 (a non-existent address that should have been unroutable) which responded instantly.

Oh, and "omnicc -debug 1-200 2> /tmp/somewhere" doesn't put the same data into /tmp/somewhere as you get on stderr when you run "omnicc -debug 1-200" and stderr is a tty.

The root cause of the error message about being unable to connect to the server? The hostname of the Linux client didn't resolve correctly.


Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://x.ifost.org.au/dp-book). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector