Siebel Gateway Server – All about it

Siebel Gateway Server – All about it

February 16th, 2013 Sunil Leave a comment Go to comments

What is Siebel Gateway Server and what does it do?

A Siebel Enterprise may consist of multiple servers – which in turn may have multiple components. Now these components will have different parameters. In order to easily manage and maintain all the information for the enterprise – Siebel Gateway was developed. Siebel Gateway is a service or daemon process that maintains the enterprise configuration in a text file called – siebns.dat. As siebns.dat contains all the details for the enterprise – this file is often called as Enterprise Configuration File.

How to check if Siebns.dat file is corrupt:

1. Server Configuration and Management screens will not be accessible and will give an error – An Error has occurred creating business component ‘Server Server’ used by business object ‘Server Admin’. Please ask your system s administrator to check your application configuration. (SBL-DAT-00222)SBL-SCM-00028: Key Not Found.You will also encounter this error – if the siebns.dat file is deleted by mistake.

2. When you try to check the status of the Siebel Service on the Gateway server using the list_ns command – you will see some junk characters rather than the normal service status and its startup time.
3. The size of your latest siebns.dat file will be less than the size of the latest siebns.dat backup file.

Different ways to manually backup siebns.dat file:

Although the Siebel Gateway Service frequently backs up the siebns.dat and keeps the latest five versions of it – we can manually backup the siebns.dat file
1. The siebns.dat file can be backed up from Sitemap->Server Configuration->Enterprise Explorer ->Backup Enterprise Button – this will create the backup for the siebns.dat file in the Admin Folder( on Windows Platform) OR Sys Folder ( on Unix Platform) of the siebel Gateway’s installation Directory. The file created will have a suffix with the timestamp of the file creation.
2. Use the following command from server manager.
backup nameserver file_name

If a file name is not specified, the backup file is named with the date and time in the format siebns.dat_yyyymmdd_hhmmss. This file is stored in the Administration directory of the Siebel Server root directory on Windows and the Sys directory of the Siebel Server root directory on UNIX.

How to increase the log levels for siebel Gateway:

At times I have seen most of the administrators struggling while debugging issues related to Siebel Gateway – as they cannot generate extended or detailed logs for siebel gateway – its very simple:
Under Windows Platform – change the value of the environment variable – SIEBEL_LOG_EVENTS to 4 or 5 to get the detailed logs. The same holds true for Unix Platform. Once the change in the environment variable has taken effect – you can see detailed or extended logs getting written in the nameserver log file.

How to Change the Siebel Gateway Hostname:

Below are the steps that need to be followed when you want to change the Siebel Gateway hostname:
1. Make changes to the .profile file – change the SIEBEL_GATEWAY parameter to reflect the new gateway hostname
2. Change the parameter DSConnectString for the named subsystem GatewayDataSrc by issuing the following command at the ENTERPRISE LEVEL – No need to set or connect to any specific server
Change param DSConnectString=:2320 for named subsystem GatewayDataSrc
3. Change the parameter Host for the gateway siebel server by issuing the following command:
Change param Host= for server
4. Regenerate the svc file by issuing the following command from the $siebel_root/bin directory from each siebel application server:
siebctl -S siebsrvr -i EnterpriseName:SiebsrvrName -a -g “-g NEWGatewayServerHostName:gtwyport -e EnterpriseName -s SiebsrvrName -u sadmin” – e Password -L ENU
5. Restart the Siebel Gateway server
6. Restart ALL the siebel application servers.