OXLoadBalancingClustering NetworkConfiguration

Network configuration

Open-Xchange Server uses multicast discovery to find other nodes. Once this discovery has been successful, the groupware nodes will establish TCP connections for cache communication.

Configure a multicast address for the servers' network. This needs to be done on all groupware nodes.

$ vim /etc/network/interfaces
[...]
iface eth0 inet static
[...]
        post-up route add -net 224.0.0.0/8 dev eth0

Check the Open-Xchange Servers cache configuration files /opt/open-xchange/etc/groupware/cache.ccf and /opt/open-xchange/etc/admindaemon/cache.ccf on all groupware nodes. Only the very last section is interesting for distributed caching (jcs.auxiliary.*) Make sure the TCPServers attribute is commented out and the UDPDiscovery settings are active. Also check the cache configuration for /opt/open-xchange/etc/groupware/sessioncache.ccf

# jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.TcpServers=127.0.0.1:57461
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.TcpListenerPort=57462
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.UdpDiscoveryAddr=224.0.0.1
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.UdpDiscoveryPort=6780
jcs.auxiliary.LTCP.attributes.UdpDiscoveryEnabled=true

These settings configure Open-Xchange Server to discover other nodes through the multicast address 224.0.0.1 and UDP port 6780. Note that the property TcpListenerPort differs at the groupware and admindaemon configuration file. This is required to avoid socket conflicts, they define the TCP port that listens for incoming connections by other groupware nodes.

Restart the networking to enable the new multicast address on both groupware nodes. Also restart the Open-Xchange Server processes on all nodes.

$ /etc/init.d/networking restart
$ /etc/init.d/open-xchange restart

Test the network settings

The new routing information for the multicast network should be available when printing the routing table.

$ route -n
[...]
224.0.0.0       0.0.0.0         255.0.0.0       U     0      0        0 eth0

TCP connections that are created after the UDP multicast discovery are shown with netstat.

$netstat -tlpa | grep java | grep ESTABLISHED
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:49103            oxgw02:57461 ESTABLISHED 3706/java
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:37912            oxgw02:57462 ESTABLISHED 3706/java
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:58849            oxgw02:49302 ESTABLISHED 3706/java
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:57462            oxgw02:46054 ESTABLISHED 3706/java
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:57462            oxgw01:41904 ESTABLISHED 3706/java
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:48628            oxgw02:57461 ESTABLISHED 3582/java
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:57461            oxgw02:47115 ESTABLISHED 3582/java
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:57461            oxgw02:57348 ESTABLISHED 3582/java
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:57461            oxgw01:42589 ESTABLISHED 3582/java
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:43960            oxgw02:57462 ESTABLISHED 3582/java
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:41904            oxgw01:57462 ESTABLISHED 3582/java
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:42589            oxgw01:57461 ESTABLISHED 3706/java
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:43786            oxgw02:57461 ESTABLISHED 3706/java
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:35196            oxgw02:58849 ESTABLISHED 3706/java
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:57462            oxgw02:44548 ESTABLISHED 3706/java
tcp6       0      0 oxgw01:57461            oxgw02:44893 ESTABLISHED 3582/java

How to verify those connections? The last line shows a process id (PID) of the local process that has an established connection. In this case, PID3706 is the Open-Xchange Groupware Daemon and PID3582 is the Open-Xchange Administration Daemon. These services build mesh connections between each groupware, each admindaemon and each foldercache service. Some connections are used bidirectionally so only one connection is visible, others use two connections (inbound and outbound) depending on the network responses. It is important that each service is connected to each other while the foldercache is only connected between two groupware services. It can take some time until all connections are established after Open-Xchange Server has been started. In this example, the first two lines indicate connections between the local groupware process and the remote admindaemon and groupware processes.