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ilssac
ilssac
Inspiring
November 2, 2009
Question

Suddenly can not connect to our Acitive Directory server.

  • November 2, 2009
  • 1 reply
  • 571 views
ColdFusion code that was running fine this last Friday, for nearly two 
years before then, is suddenly throwing this error today "Connection to 
LDAP server failed".  The Active Directory is up and responding to pings 
and all normal windows logons are being preformed properly.  But neither 
ColdFusion nor my Softerra LDAP Browser can make a connection with 
multiple user names.

Can anybody provide a short list of what could have been changed that 
would of started this problem?
    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    A
    Adam Cameron.
    Inspiring
    November 2, 2009

    Something must've changed on the ADS server.  Have you got it set to automatically update from Microsoft Update (hopefully not, if it's a production server!), and did any patches come down?  Network infrastructure changes?

    If you put the Softerra browser on the ADS server itself and try to connect, any joy?

    --

    Adam

    ilssac
    ilssacAuthor
    Inspiring
    November 2, 2009

    The server was not responding to anything, accept pings, as best as we could tell.

    Since this was affecting production applications, preventing empoyees from duing their work, the box was booted.  The sys admin had to physically walk up to the server room as he could not even remote into the system.

    I am now told that there are three active directory servers sharing the load in our organization.  I'm guessing it is possible that the windows login operations where failing over to another of the trio.  But that the CFML code, that is hard coded to a specific one of the AD servers, could not do this.

    If this is a common set up, I have to research the details more, is there some way to tell ColdFusion to make to a connection to any of the three AD servers, whichever one is availaible.  Or do I need to create my own fail over code using try-catch blocks, or some other exception handling choice.  Basically code it to try server A, if that does not work, try server B, if still a problem try server C.

    That later is not hard code to visualize, but it seems to be very dependant on the exact network configuration.  Whereas, if there was some way to query all the available AD servers as a clustor, then I presume the network folks could swap servers into and out of the clustor without really affecting our code.  That would by my hope anyway.

    A
    Adam Cameron.
    Inspiring
    November 2, 2009

    I odn't think there is a way of making CF do that, other than rolling your own.  I can't decide whether this sort of traffic dispersal is really the job of the CF application or some sort of traffic management software like ZXTM.  Although there's no problem with having more than one way to skin a cat.

    I'd raise an E/R if I was you: http://cfbugs.adobe.com/cfbugreport/flexbugui/cfbugtracker/main.html

    --

    Adam

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