So much for daily updates, eh? Between trying to launch the new site, getting caught up watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 3 on DVD, and playing Rockband for Wii (Plus a solid 50 hours a week work), my time has been pretty monopolized. In keeping with the idea of daily insight though, I wanted to drop a quick nugget today about Synchrony Gateway 6.11.4 from Axway, and what I found out today about the Secure Relay product that you use with it.
PSO is onsite where I’m consulting for the next week to aid with installing a 4th environment (A non production External facing test environment), and upgrading our Dev environment from the Synchrony Gateway 6.9.1 product to 6.11.4. Recently we went through a pretty big ordeal of patching Gateway 6.9.1 to SP6 on all of our environments, which required an upgrade of java on the XSR boxes, and a whole new version of the Secure Relay Router Agent - Version 2.1.1. When developing the gameplan for upgrading the Dev environment to 6.11.4, imagine my surprise when PSO informed me that we’d have to actually roll back our version of the Secure Relay (XSR), as it is not compatible with the new version of Gateway.
While I’m very excited to be upgrading to the new version of Gateway for some very obvious improved functionality, and some stuff that I’m actually crossing my fingers on (Making FTPS not suck, increased SSH support, better control over transfer models), it’s pretty frustrating to have gone through an upgrade of one of the components, only to have to downgrade that same component to work with a NEWER version of the Main Gateway software. As with most of what I believe is backwards about the Axway Synchrony suite of products, this is just incredibly counter-intuitive.
From a software engineering perspective, doesn’t it make sense not to update a component of a large software suite to a newer version unless the programs dependent on that program upgrade as well? Doing exactly the opposite, in this case updating the XSR component while only updating the Gateway product in the form of a Service Pack, doesn’t make any sense. I should add that I’m not a developer, most of my knowledge and experience is with actual business solutions, but this one seems like a no-brainer. It should be anticipated that users of the core component, Gateway, will eventually upgrade. If the effort is being made to apply service packs and patches, the software will probably be updated eventually! If one has to take steps to upgrade, but in doing so has to rollback another component to a previous version, something is wrong.
Since I’m in a griping mood tonight, I thought I’d also share an update on my FTP over SSL/TLS conundrum as well! Axway support has finally set up an FTPS server for me to test sending a file to, but 3 days after trying to send a file they informed me that there was a misconfiguration on their side. I tried with no luck to send a file through again, and they said they had to enable further logging. I tried to send a file through yet again, and got this nice response back from support -
Hello Tony I tried to call you right now and left you a voicemail, we are getting errors when you are trying to connect I suspect right now it to be because of misconfiguration on your side, I tested connection using Gateway and it is working fine for me, I’d like to set a webexsession to review your configuration and show you mine.
I’ll call you tommorow first ting in the morning at 8 am (AZ time)
You like that? “I suspect right now it to be because of misconfiguration on your side”…how nice. After months of trying to resolve this, that’s what I get. Maybe we’ll finally get to the conclusion that the Gateway product in our production environment may not be configured correctly for FTPS use. It’s only taken 9 months of tickets. I’ve confirmed with networking that we don’t block any incoming traffic, so having the data port be arbitrary shouldn’t give us any problems. I’ve been through Gateway training and heavily scrutinized the very quick FTPS examples we used. I’ve tried to communicate with other users about the issue, but outside of the Axway Connections conference, there’s not a very good medium to do that, so here I sit!
I’ll keep my fingers crossed, but definitely won’t hold my breath on getting this resolved. I’m hoping that a conference call this week with a product manager on B2B protocol enhancement will yield positive results, but again not holding my breath. FTPS sucks. It’s a bad protocol, but it’s still necessary, and Axway has not kept up with the need of it’s customers to make it work with the Synchrony Gateway product. The site hit number 1 on google for the term “Axway Sucks” yesterday, completely coincidentally, but it occured to me that maybe such a thing is what we need to get the stuff fixed. Axway’s not an unreasonable company, just out of touch. Perhaps some motivation will help in getting this stuff fixed. Having customers that are so visible being able to say “The Synchrony Suite works great for Secure FTP protocols!!!” would obviously be benficial, and I’d love to be able to say it!
Nighty Night!
Tony Lloyd
