Re: Diagnosing ACS Connection issues

Le 17/07/2022 à 18:58, Jon Paris a écrit :

I am running a series of remote classes for a client and they are unable to connect via ACS.

I am convinced that it is a firewall issue at their end and they are equally convinced that it is not.

Here's the scenario.

Fire up ACS and it asks for user Id and pw. Connection appears to be made and green screen appears but never connects.

>From the same location users who have installed Code for IBM i can use the 5250 terminal in that to sign on. Trouble is that terminal is (to be polite) pretty horrible and not really practical to work with for a group trying to learn the basics of IBM i.

Do you mean Visual Code Studio? If yes, as far as I know, this tool only uses ssh.

Any suggestions on what tooling I can ask them to run to attempt to identify the blockage?

In that particular case, I am used to take a communication trace on the target side. However, in order to narrow the trace output, it is best to know at least one of the client IP addresses so that you can select it.

ACS needs a set of tcp ports to be open from the client to the server. Checkout https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/tcpip-ports-required-ibm-i-access-and-related-functions for the full list.

To help diagnosing the network issue, ask them to initiate a connection when a trace is running. If the trace does not show any incoming packets from the client IPs, or incoming packets to non ACS ports, this is most probably a firewall issue.

Is there another terminal option that would utilize the same connection as Code for IBM i (assumedly SSH) as its communication vehicle?

I was hoping that their firewall restriction might be related to only permitting secure connection ports so I've tried to get my ACS running with SSL but sadly that was a miserable failure and the error messages make so sense to me so I've abandoned even trying that for now.


Any thoughts ?

If using ssh is mandatory, you can try to set an ssh tunnel on the client device. Example with putty here https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/power-iaas?topic=power-iaas-connect-ibmi

Jon P.