504 Gateway Timeout when executing smt-ncc-sync

This document (7010991) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11
Subscription Management Tool 11
SUSE Manager

Situation

NOTE regarding (SLE10 and SLE11 only):
Novell Customer Center (NCC) and nu.novell.com are not available anymore.
SLE10 and SLE11 Systems still registered to the Novell Customer Center (NCC) can be migrated to the SUSE Customer Center (SCC) as outlined at:
SUSE Customer Center (SCC) enablement for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11

In the SMT log files of the smt-ncc-sync command (/var/log/smt/smt-ncc-sync.log on SMT 11), you find the following failure message:

2012-10-24 01:03:58 SMT::Mirror::RegData - [error] Failed to POST
'https://secure-www.novell.com/center/regsvc-1.0/?command=regdata&lang=en-US&version=1.0': 504 Gateway Time-Out

The acording smt-ncc-sync cron job in /etc/smt.d/novell.com-smt is set to a time between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. GMT.

The same may be true on a SUSE Manager system, when executing the mgr-ncc-sync command.

The cause of the issue is, that because of the huge numbers of installed SMT servers the default sync window is too small. There is a peak of SMT traffic between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. GMT.

Resolution

Please install smt version 1.2.1-0.5.1 or higher. This update re-schedules the smt-daily and the smt-gen-report cronjobs, if they are still configured to use the default sync window.

As an alternative it is possible to to fix the issue on your SMT server manually: Edit the file

/etc/smt.d/novell.com-smt

and alter the smt-daily line which may look as follows:

10 1 * * * root /usr/lib/SMT/bin/smt-daily

The second field stands for the hour, in which the cron job is executed. Alter this number in a way to add two to five hours. As an example:

10 4 * * * root /usr/lib/SMT/bin/smt-daily

In this example the smt-ncc-sync job is scheduled 3 hours later.

Additional Information

We identified and implemented some efficiencies in our gateway stack that allowed more systems to sync at once. This reduced the number of gateway timeouts during peak usage.
We've identified and implemented additional efficiencies related to the way the registration service connects to the database.

Disclaimer

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