Known Errors and Restrictions in Micro Focus Server

The restrictions covered here are those that are not covered elsewhere in the documentation, or that are of a temporary nature and may be removed in a later product. Permanent limits are generally covered in the main Help.

The notes below describe some known errors and restrictions in your installation.

• 64-bit - Unsupported Features
• Application-Managed Services
• CICS Unsupported Transactions
• Client-Server Binding
• Databases Supported in Enterprise Server
• Dialog System
• Debuggable SEP
• Deployment
• Documentation
• Enterprise Server Administration Web Pages
• Fileshare on 64-bit systems
• FSVIEW API and Command-line Interface
• IMS Interface Mapping
• License Reports
• Run-Time System
• Security Configuration for Enterprise Server
• Security Management
• Security and SNMP
• Simultaneous Client Requests (MTO)
• SORT/MERGE
• Transactional Client Requests
• Unicode
• WebSphere and EJB 3.0
• WrapPack 2 Uninstall

If you have installed a WrapPack containing updates and fixes to your installation, the fixes and any last-minute issues are documented in the WrapPack readme, which is downloadable with the WrapPack from the SupportLine Web site. For details of how to get the latest information see Updates and SupportLine

64-bit - Unsupported Features

• The following run-time features are not supported in 64-bit:
  • HyHelp
  • Enterprise Server. Some features might compile correctly, but won't run.

Application-Managed Services

• If you have configured Enterprise Server to support container-managed services by defining external XA resource managers, any application-managed service that issues CONNECTs to, or DISCONNECTs from, one of these defined resource managers might receive warning- level response codes.

CICS Unsupported Transactions

• The reference help for Mainframe Transaction Option includes topics on some CICS transactions that are not supported and are not included in the software. These are:
  • CGWY
  • CPOP
  • CRTE
  • CSSF

Client-Server Binding

• When running mfserver in the background, you must use the -b option to mfserver, and close or redirect standard input, or mfserver will receive a SIGTTOU (terminal output) signal and stop when a client connects to it. For example:

  cobrun mfserver -s filetran -b < /dev/null &
  

  -532893

Databases Supported in Enterprise Server

• A list of databases supported is missing from the section Container- managed Services in the chapter Introduction of your Enterprise Server Configuration and Administration Guide. The list should follow the second paragraph and should read:
  • IBM DB2
  • Oracle

Debuggable SEP

• Under HP UNIX, PA-RISC, because of an issue with the operating system, when a debuggable SEP is removed from the ES pool, it is not always removed cleanly. This debuggable SEP might be 'terminated' and will show up in console.log as 'terminating due to run-time error'. This should not affect your ES system.

  -536360

Deployment

• If you upgraded from a previous version of Micro Focus Server and have retained any enterprise servers that have a Web Services listener, you will receive an error when you deploy informing you that the listener cannot be found. To fix this, change the listener name before deploying using one of the following methods:
  • From Micro Focus Server Administration, change the listener name from Web Services to Web Services and J2EE.
  • Edit your deployment service (usually named Deployer) and add the following lines to the Configuration Information area:

    [destination]
    listener=Web Services

  • If your deployment service doesn't have the listener name specified, edit the base\deploy\.mfdeploy file changing the Web Services listener name to Web Services and J2EE.

Dialog System

• Dialog System does not run correctly on a terminal that has more than 25 lines. To work around this set the LINES environment variable to 25.

Documentation

• If the Web Browser tells you it's blocking active content, when you view the Help, you need to allow active content. See the Software Requirements section in Hardware and Software Requirements.
• You can view the Enterprise Server documentation in a separate browser window while you are using the Enterprise Server Administration Web interface, by clicking Contents in the menu at the left-hand side of the page. For this link to work, you must have the following in place:
  • An enterprise server that has a Web listener with the following entry in the [virtual paths] section:

    docs=<ES>/docs/html

  • The enterprise server must be started

  The default enterprise server, ESDEMO, may not have the correct configuration information entry for its Web listener. If you encounter problems accessing this documentation while you are using ESDEMO, you must correct the entry using the Edit Listener page. Note that references to this configuration entry in the context help and the Enterprise Server Configuration and Administration Guide are no longer correct and you must use the entry as specified above.

  When you create a new enterprise server, a Web listener with the required configuration information entry is automatically created.

Enterprise Server Administration Web Pages

• If the buttons on the Enterprise Server Administration Web page don't work, you need to enable Active Scripting or JavaScript. See the Software Requirements section in Hardware and Software Requirements.

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Fileshare on 64-bit systems

• Fileshare does not correctly set offsets in 64-bit bytestream I/O operations.

FSVIEW API and Command-line Interface

• The FSVIEW calls and commands that have to do with log files are not currently implemented.

IMS Interface Mapping

• On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 i686 (32 bit), the run-time system error COBRT252 "Memory corruption detected (Fatal)”, might occur when running deployed IMS service interfaces with tracing enabled. (To eanble tracing, you check Generate Trace in the IMS pane of the Service Interface Settings dialog). The workaround is to redeploy the service interface with the tracing flag turned off.

  -550132

License Reports

• A CPU license for MTO or Micro Focus Server currently provides unlimited use of the product. With this CPU license, if you use the license manager command eslmfgetpv t to produce a license report, DEVMTO (or DEVES) usage is not reported and 0 is shown against the appropriate license totals. 536449

Run-Time System

• Threaded programs. If you create a multi-threaded application that uses CBL_EXIT_PROC to perform an exit procedure when the program terminates, and an error occurs during the exit procedure, the application does not terminate with a non-zero exit code to the operating system. Shared object- C module load failure.
• On IBM s/390, if you create a run-time system that includes a C module and you use the run-time system to run a COBOL shared object that calls a function within the C module, you will get an RTS 198 load error for that function when "." (dot) is included as a directory to be searched on the load library path (LD_LIBRARY_PATH).
• Deleting files. On HP-UNIX, if a program attempts to delete a file that is already open to another user, the file status returned is 0/065 (File locked), instead of the more usual 9/029 (Attempt to delete open file). This applies to 32-bit files only: 64-bit files return the usual file status.

Security Configuration for Enterprise Server

On some platforms the OpenLDAP client library is not supplied as standard. As a consequence, if the Enterprise Server administrator adds a new Security Manager that attempts to use the "mldap_esm" module supplied by Micro Focus the following runtime errors may occur:

• If a Security Manager using "mldap_esm" is added to the Default ES Security Manager List (the default is not to use an external Security Manager) the following error will appear in the console when attempting to start an Enterprise Server instance:

  ESFMI0201C Unable to load ESM Module "[Security Manager name]"
            (mldap_esm)

  Similarly, if such a Security Manager is added to the security configuration for a specific Enterprise Server instance, over-riding the default ES security, the same error will occur.

• If a Security Manager using "mldap_esm" is added to the Directory Server Security Manager List (the default is to use the "MFDS Internal Security" Manager), the following error will be displayed:

  SF0024E Error 16/4/0 SAFMGR initialization failed: 
      Failure loading ESM Module 

  The Security Manager will not be used by Directory Server Security.

• If OpenLDAP client support is not present, MF Directory Server repository location configuration will also display an error if the MF Directory Server repository location is changed to an LDAP server partition:

  MDS1503E Schema check error: 501, OTHER. 
      Previous schema path restored.

Some UNIX systems may already have OpenLDAP installed. On other systems, you may wish to use the OpenLDAP provided by Micro Focus, if it is included with the product on your platform. See the $COBDIR/bin/configure_openldap script and $COBDIR/etc/readme-ldap.txt for more information.

Security Management

• An Enterprise Server that is configured to use a Security Manager that uses the mldap_esm module (that is, using LDAP for security) cannot be started using a file repository, either by using the -m option to casstart and specifying a file path, or by running casstart when MFDS is not available.

  -542314

• A new facility called passtokens can be configured to let administrators move back and forth between MFDS and ESMAC without signing in each time they switch from one to the other. (This requires that MFDS and Enterprise Server use the same security configuration, and that the user has appropriate privileges.) However, the passtoken is created when the HTML page with the link to the other facility (for example, the MFDS "server details" page with the ESMAC link) is generated, and passtokens expire after a short time. If you wait too long before clicking the link to go from MFDS to ESMAC or from ESMAC to MFDS, you will be forced to sign on again.

  - 543176

• Customers who use the audit feature of Enterprise Server security should be aware that we cannot enforce auditing for administrative changes to the security configuration (adding or removing users, changing permissions, etc). A user with sufficient privilege (an administrator) can disable auditing before performing other administrative changes, or use third-party tools to update the configuration in the ESM without using any Micro Focus tooling at all.

  -543360

• When external security is enabled for Enterprise Server, user credentials (username and password) have to be supplied to casstart in order to start the region. casstart uses those to do an ESF Verify and Auth to ensure that the user has authority to start the region. casstart also uses those credentials to bind to MFDS.

  A problem can arise because MFDS is a different security domain from Enterprise Server and may have a different security configuration, particularly if Enterprise Server is using an ESM (such as the eTrust one) that doesn't support MFDS. Consequently, administrators may have to define user accounts twice, once in the ESM used by Enterprise Server, and once in MFDS internal security (or a different ESM used by MFDS), in order to let those users start a region.

  -543472

Security and SNMP

• The Micro Focus Audit Manager Configuration supporting includes both node and port address options. These are used to specify the location of the Management Console that will receive the SNMP Trap events that are generated by the auditor.

  When using WinSNMP as the local agent these location parameters may be ignored by the Windows implementation of the WinSNMP interface. This can happen if the system has a valid configuration of Microsoft's SNMP service agent for the "public" community. If the SNMP agent configuration is present this is used by the WinSNMP instead of the Micro Focus location options even if the Microsoft SNMP system service is not actually running at the time.

Simultaneous Client Requests (MTO)

• If you have clients using the ECI interface with the CICS Transaction Gateway to communicate with a CICS application running in Mainframe Transaction Option (MTO), a client program might receive an ECI_ERR_TRANSACTION_ABEND return code with an abend code of AZTY, indicating that several clients tried to communicate with the system at the same time but not all requests could be satisfied by MTO. The workaround for this issue is to set the environment variable TX_UNICLI_SESSIONS to the required number of sessions in the Configuration Information for the enterprise server as follows:

  [ES-Environment]
  TX_UNICLI_SESSIONS=<required-number-of-sessions> 
  

  The default is 4.

  You should set "Maximum requests" in the Client Section of the CICS Transaction Gateway configuration to the same value.

  If you do this you will also probably need to change the client program to ignore the ECI-ERROR_MAX_SESSIONS return code and retry the call. For example

  do 
    {
      Rc = CICS_ExternalCall (&EciParms);
    } while (Rc == ECI_ERR_MAX_SESSIONS); 
  

  If you do not make this modification, the client program might still receive the ECI_ERR_TRANSACTION_ABEND return code.

SORT/MERGE

• SORT/MERGE using old .int files. A program error might occur if you are executing intermediate code files that were created using previous versions of COBOL for UNIX and which include SORT/MERGE statements.
• Sorts using the NLS directive. Programs compiled with the NLS directive that make use of COBOL SORT with alphanumeric keys return records in the standard alphanumeric order, rather than in the correct order for the NLS locale. This restriction only applies to file sorts and not to table sorts.

  - 514543

Transactional Client Requests

• When a COBOL service that is processing a transactional J2EE client request using the local connector (mfcobol-localtx.rar) fails by ending with a fail return-code, Enterprise Server displays the message:

  Cannot end/commit/rollback/recover a transaction that doesn't exist

  This message is incorrect, as in this case rollback has succeeded and your data is in a stable state.

  -533220

Unicode

• DISPLAY-OF intrinsic function. When using the DISPLAY-OF intrinsic function to convert Unicode characters to your current locale, any Unicode characters that have no equivalent in the current locale might not be replaced by the optional default replacement character on some UNIX platforms.

  -532366

• ICONV_BYTEORDER. On the TRU64 platform, in order for the Unicode support to work, you need to set the ICONV_BYTEORDER environment variable as follows: ICONV_BYTEORDER=little-endian export ICONV_BYTEORDER.

WebSphere and EJB 3.0

With stateful EJB generated for EJB 3.0, there is a problem using the test client. All test clients use the same EJB instance. There is also an issue with stateful EJB timeout. There is no way to set timeout programmatically for EJB 3.0. This is a WebSphere limitation at this time.

- 556818

WrapPack 2 Uninstall

• If you install the 5.1 WrapPack 2 release over 5.1 GA or 5.1 WrapPack 1 - and perform a subsequent uninstall of WrapPack 2- you will need to manually restart MFDS to ensure services are restarted correctly.