Jeff's Cluttered Mind

Here are some notes on an Informatica PowerCenter 9.6.1 64 bit server install.  This also includes the setup of the Informatica Cloud Secure Agent (64)

Most of the install went smooth.  However I want to list some of the problems I encountered.

Something unique about this install is the PowerCenter server name was in this format: SERVERT.corpt.tginternaltest.dev.  There was another server in our network with the similar name, SERVERT, which is running PowerCenter server 9.1. This would cause issues later.

Domain/Host name issues

During the PowerCenter install, the setup software defaulted the Informatica Domain name to "Domain_SERVERT" and the (gateway) host name as SERVERT.  Which is the same as the 9.1 PowerCenter server.   This proved a problem when I tried to setup the PowerCenter 9.6.1 client on my laptop. It could not connect to my 9.6.1 domain because it was trying connect to the existing 9.1 domain  (which had the same domain and host name).  When I installed the PowerCenter client on the 9.6.1 server it connected correctly.  The other issue I had because of the conflicting domain and host name was accessing the 9.6.1 Admin console from my laptop.  It worked from the server.

As of PowerCenter 9.6.1, there is no way to rename the Domain name so I reluctantly uninstalled PowerCenter 9.6.1 server and reinstalled, this time using a different domain name, "Domain_SERVERTG", I left the default host name as SERVERT which was a mistake because after the install I still could not connect with my PowerCenter client.  Luckily there is a way to rename the (gateway) Host name.  Informatica Support Knowledge base article 118359 has the details, you use the "infasetup" command like this:

infasetup.bat UpdateGatewayNode -nodeaddress SERVERT.corpt.tginternaltest.dev:6010 -rst

That solved my problem, I was able to connect to PowerCenter from my laptop as well as access the Admin console.

ODBC issue

A big issue during this project was with the IBM iSeries Client Access 32 and 64 bit ODBC drivers.  For some reason PowerCenter 9.6.1 and the Cloud Secure Agent (32 & 64) had problems using the IBM supplied ODBC drivers.  For our project, we had installed the 64 bit IBM Client Access application (which I think also installs the 32 bit drivers).  Needless to say, we have to pull data from the iSeries.  When using the IBM driver, Cloud Mappings, PowerCenter mappings, Data Sync jobs, etc. would end with  "[DTM_10004] The DTM process terminated unexpectedly" error, the logs would show no more information.  The logs would appear as if they job just stopped, showing no errors.  My network admins traced our jobs and found no issues, no ports blocked, not permission errors, nothing that could be a problem.

Another error we received was "RR_4035 SQL Error [ FnName: Fetch Optimize -- [Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Function sequence error]"

After a week of troubleshooting, research and working with Informatica Global Customer support (which included uninstalling the Cloud 64 bit agent an installing the 32 bit agent and installing 3rd party ODBC driver from Hit software and DataDirect, which worked by the way, so I knew the issue was with the iSeries drivers and Informatica), I finally found this Informatica Community Post where someone else had the same (or similar issue) here.

The fix was to add the custom property/configuration "OptimizeODBCRead" equal to value No.  So in PowerCenter server I added this as an Integration server custom property and in the Cloud secure agent I changed the OptimizeODBCRead DTM property.   This seemed to fix all the ODBC issues.  I hope that performance is not hindered by changing this property.

Other Issues

As with any 64 bit software make sure you are using the correct drivers,  if you have a 64 bit application like the Cloud Secure Agent, use the appropriate 64 bit driver or you will get the error "The connection test failed. [Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] The specified DSN contains an architecture mismatch between the Driver and Application"

Web Service SSL Issues - Unknown SSL protocol error

Another troubling issue was the inability to call web services on the iSeries (Apache web server) using https (SSL). Informatica Cloud jobs would give the error "Unknown SSL protocol error in connection", PowerCenter jobs ran correctly. Sometimes this error leads you to believe you have the wrong SSL certificates on the Informatica server but in our case I believe the error "Unknown SSL protocol" is accurate.

The Informatica Secure Agent installs CURL under it's \tools\ folder. I used Curl to test our ca-bundle.crt file and kept getting errors but since I used the same ca-bundle.crt file for PowerCenter as the Cloud and PowerCenter was working, I eliminated the probability the certificates where the problem.

After googling CURL and various issues I tried downloading a new version of curl to the server and running the commands to verify the certificates again. This time, using an updated CURL version, I did not get any errors, that supported my theory the ca-bundle.crt file was correct.

CURL example:

curl --cacert ca-bundle.crt -v https://gekko.server.com:3443/cgi-bin/jsmdirect?dqa_wsw1212

After testing with CURL, I ran a WireShark trace, the results indicated Informatia Cloud was using a We uninstalled the 64 bit agent and installed the 32 bit version and it worked correctly, Informatica Global Support determined there was a bug in the 64 bit agent and they created a patch for us that solved the problem. The fix was supposed to be added to the base code for the 64 bit agent so no one else should have this issue.

Thank you for your support

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