My boss recently impressed to me on the need to have a complete design document for the implementation of an AppFabric cache cluster. This documents was supposed to cover all the areas of the implementation ranging from the architecture, to the changes from the current setup up and even the troubleshooting steps required incase the cluster is unavailable.
Therefore in this post I will give 3 of the most commonly encountered issues which render the cache cluster unavailable. Before going into that the following link below gives in introduction to what AppFabric is and the initial configuration options including security.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff383731(v=azure.10).aspx
So in the configuration following the walk through from the link above , below are some of the troubleshooting steps for some of the issues one might encounter.
1. Service not running
Error Message: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it {hostname}:22233
Possible Issue: The AppFabricCachingService is not running on the server.
Resolution: Run services.msc and verify that the service is running. While at it ensure that its startup type is set to Automatic.
2. Mistmatched security settings
Error Message: The requested upgrade is not supported by ‘net.tcp://{hostname}:22233/’. This could be due to mismatched bindings (for example security enabled on the client and not on the server).
Possible Issue: There is a mismatch in the security setting between the cache cluster and the client (ASP.NET Application).
Resolution: Run the command below to confirm the security mode in the cluster is set to Transport. Note that this command requires stopping the cluster service using the command Stop-CacheCluster.
Set-CacheClusterSecurity -SecurityMode Transport -ProtectionLevel None
Additionally run the command below to ensure that all built in accounts on the application servers have been granted access to the cache cluster.
Grant-CacheAllowedClientAccount -Account “DOMAIN1\Server1$”
More information on the security model is found in this link.
3. None existent cache
Error Message: ErrorCode<ERRCA0009>:SubStatus<ES0001>:Cache referred to does not exist. Contact administrator or use the Cache administration tool to create a Cache.
Possible issue: The cache doesn’t exist.
Resolution: Go to the initial configuration parameters section of this document and create a cache using those values specified there. Confirm the cache creation by running the Get-Cache command.
More cache cluster, cache host and cache management commands can be found in this link.