Open Microscopy Environment

I'm developing some Chef recipes for installing Omero on virtual machines in the NeCTAR cloud, and I ran into a problem with the installed system. Basically, I couldn't get external clients to connect on ports 4063 and 4064. I checked the external firewalls and so on. No dice.

Then I ran netstat -a. It turned out that nothing on the server was listening on TCP IPv4 on those ports.

After a lot of digging, I discovered that in etc/grid/default.xml, the client-endpoints attribute was defined thus:

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    client-endpoints="ssl -p ${ROUTERPORT}:tcp -p 4063"

But the documentation I found for glacier2router configs says that you can specify an endpoint host explicitly using the -h parameter. So I changed the attribute to this.

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client-endpoints="ssl -h nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn -p ${ROUTERPORT}:tcp -h nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn -p 4063"

where nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn is the server's IP address. And restarted. And it worked. Netstat shows that something is now listening on those ports, and I can get external clients to talk to the server.

Question 1) do you have any idea why I needed to do that to the default.xml file to get Omero.server to listen?

The installation instructions don't mention this. The troubleshooting instructions don't either.

Question 2) assuming that I really do need to localize to make this work, is there a neat way to avoid hacking the default.xml file (in place or a copy)? I'd like to make my recipes work without embedding a "snarfed" copy of any Omero config files into the cookbook ... 'cos that is liable to be problematic as Omero evolves.

crawley wrote:I'm developing some Chef recipes for installing Omero on virtual machines in the NeCTAR cloud

Interesting.

Basically, I couldn't get external clients to connect on ports 4063 and 4064. ... It turned out that nothing on the server was listening on TCP IPv4 on those ports.

Ice proxy strings with no host name are intended to listen on all interfaces (see "Server semantics"):

http://doc.zeroc.com/display/Ice/Proxy+and+Endpoint+Syntax#ProxyandEndpointSyntax-AddressSyntax

Question 1) do you have any idea why I needed to do that to the default.xml file to get Omero.server to listen?
The installation instructions don't mention this. The troubleshooting instructions don't either.

I've not yet found a reason on the ZeroC forums why it wouldn't in your case, but will keep looking. I also don't remember it happening before, which would likely explain why it's not (yet!) on the troubleshooting page.

Question 2) assuming that I really do need to localize to make this work, is there a neat way to avoid hacking the default.xml file (in place or a copy)? I'd like to make my recipes work without embedding a "snarfed" copy of any Omero config files into the cookbook ... 'cos that is liable to be problematic as Omero evolves.

Ice.Default.Host, described on the "Proxy+And+Endpoint+Syntax" page above may be what you need:

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$ netstat -na | grep 4064
tcp6       0      0 :::4064                 :::*                    LISTEN     
$ bin/omero config set Ice.Default.Host 127.0.0.1
$ bin/omero admin restart
Waiting on shutdown. Use CTRL-C to exit
......No descriptor given. Using etc/grid/default.xml
Waiting on startup. Use CTRL-C to exit
$ netstat -na | grep 4064
tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:4064          0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN


I haven't used this in production yet, so any feedback would be appreciated!

Cheers,
~Josh.

Using "omero config set Ice.Default.Host nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn" is doing the job for me. Many thanks.

Actually, it turns out that there is some fallout from setting Ice.Default.Host to the external IP address.

If you then try to use Omero.web, it turns out that we've configured Omero.server to NOT listen on localhost any more. This is confirmed by 'netstat -a'.

But the default setting for "omero.web.server_list" configures the webclient login page with "localhost:4064" as the only selectable option. And naturally, django can't connect to the server on that IP/port.

Fortunately, this can be reconfigured; e.g. by running

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bin/omero config set "omero.web.server_list" '[["nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn", 4064, "omero"]]'

Ah, good point. Thanks for the heads up. We should be able to detect the setting and do this automatically in the future.

Cheers,
~Josh.