RSA AM 7.1 SP3 Replication - 'Needs Action'

After a SAN outage and a restart of our RSA infrastructure, the replication status of the Replica Instances from Primary to Replica was showing the status of 'Needs Action'. It appeared that RSA believed that it had not replicated in almost 3 weeks.

In order to reinitialise replication use the following command from the command line on the Primary Instance

rsautil manage-replication -a resume

After a few minutes and a refresh of the 'Check Replication Status' screen, the 'Data Transfer Status' should show as 'Complete'.

Unrestricting users of RSAUTIL.CMD

I'm using rsautil manage-backups to perform scripted backups of our RSA AM 7.1 SP3 database in conjunction with the disabled password prompt that I posted yesterday. Although when initially trying to run it under a separate service account from that which I used to install the product, I received the following error.

Error: Cannot run as user 'serviceaccount'. 'rsautil' can only be run by 'myusername' user

I contacted support and received the following response, which was very simple to implement.

• Use Windows Explorer to locate rsaenv.cmd in the ACEUTILS directory
• Open   rsaenv.cmd  in WordPad (or other editor)
• Locate the line set CLU_USER={username} where {username} is the user name of the user who installed the RSA Authentication Manager 7.1 software and comment out the line (this will preserve the user name)
• Add this line after the commented out line in point 3 "set CLU_USER=%USERNAME%"
• Save the change

Now any user who is a member of the local Windows Administrators group can use rsautils.cmd

Disable RSA AM 7.1 SP3 Backup Password Prompt

It looks like RSA have realised what a nightmare it is to backup their Authentication Manager product and have therefore eased the burden somewhat by allowing the disabling of the password prompt when ruinning a command line backup using "rasutil manage-backups".

to disable the prompting for the password when running a backup using rsautil manage-backups run the following as documented in the RSA PDFs.

rsautil manage-backups --action disable-pwd-prompt

Once entered, the RSA Master password is required to apply the change.

Integrating ISA 2006 with RSA AM 7.1 SP2

I've just finished testing RSA SecurID Token  authentication with FBA on ISA Server 2006, below are the steps that I followed.

We followed some notes at the MS TMG Technet Blog for the actual ISA Rule base configuration which is pretty straightforward.

Register ISA Servers as Authentication Agents in RSA AM 7.1


Open the RSA AM Security Console and go to 'Access', 'Authentication Agents' and 'Add New'.

Complete the details for the ISA Server as an 'Authentication Agent' including the FQDN and IP Address. I also set the 'Agent Type' to 'Web Agent' (Unlike in the screenshot).

Generate RSA AM Config File

In the Security Console go to 'Access', 'Authentication Agents' and 'Generate Configuration File'.

Check the setting and then click the 'Generate Config File' button to download the configuration file.

 Click 'Download Now' to start the configuration file download.

Download and extract the sdconf.rec from the AM_Config.zip once downloaded

Copy sdconf.rec to C:\Windows\System32\ and C:\Program Files\Microsoft ISA Server\sdconfig\ on all relevant ISA Servers.

Set Node Secret for each Authentication Agent (ISA Server)

In the RSA Security Console, go to  'Access', 'Authentication Agents' and 'Manage Existing'.


Click the arrow next tot he appropriate ISA Server and select 'Manage Node Secret...'

On the RSA AM server Locate agent_nsload.exe and copy to each ISA Server in the array

Set a node secret in RSA AM interface on each Agent entry and download .zip files when requested

Extract the NODESECRET.REC file from the supplied .zip and place with the agent_nsload.exe

To import the node secret to the ISA Server(s), run the following command

agent_nsload.exe -f <path to nodesecret.rec>  -p <node secret password>

A 'securid' file should then be created in C:\Windows\System32\ (note the lack of file extension). This file should then be copied to the "C:\Program Files\Microsoft ISA Server\sdconfig\"

That was enough to get ISA working with RSA 7.1 SP2.

Change RSA AM 7.1 SP2 Allocated Disk Space for Instance Replication

I've deployed three VMs with approx 40GB of disk space available to RSA AM 7.1 and it's database. The problem is that by default RSA AM, is configured to use a maximum of 100GB, therefore there's a chance that it could consume all of the available disk and consequently halt it's services.

The fix can be found in the Troubleshooting section of the RSA AM Administrative Guide under "Freeing Disk Space Allocated for Logging on a Replica Instance". RSA recommends allowing AM to utilise 75% of the available disk space, therefore if you have 30GB free after install then you should use 22.5GB. Unfortunately the command line doesn't appear to like the decimal point so I used 22GB.

You'll need to open a command prompt and go to the 'utils' folder in the RSA install folder and run the following command where 22 is the size that you wish to dedicate to RSA AM's logs.

rsautil manage-database -a change-max-size -f archived_trans_files -s 22

You'll be prompted to confirm your password twice and then you should receive "Done..."


That's all for now.

RSA Authentication Manager 7.1 on VMware ESX 3.5

I'm right in the middle of an RSA Authentication Manager 7.1 SP2 deployment onto VMware ESX 3.5 as I type and having stumbled across some "gotcha's" already, I've decided to note them as I go.

• It's perfectly acceptable for RSA AM 7.1 to take approximately 15 minutes to start up thanks to Java and the 'new' Oracle Database backend. About 13 minutes of the delay is at "Applying Computer Settings". (Even with 2vCPU's and 4GB RAM).
• Give the server 4GB of RAM if possible even though RSA only recommend 2GB, that way all the services will be able to start at boot up
• When installing a Replica Instance, you'll need the replica package creating on your Primary Instance and also a copy of your RSA License certs handy. Also make sure that there is connectivity from it to your existing Primary Instance and any other Replica instances that you may have. TCP port 2334 will need to be open if you've got a firewall or two in the way.
• I'm not really having a great deal of luck with RSA AM 7.1, I'm finding it very finicky in terms of connecting Replica instances to the Primary. I'm considering another rebuild of the VMs so that I'm happy that they're working as they should. I've also experienced my Primary Instance running out of disk space eventhough it had 30GB set aside just for Authentication Manager.
• I've rebuilt my Primary and Replica now and they seem to be a little more stable. I've noticed that by default AM will assume that there is 100GB of disk available for replication. Now apparently this can be changed by following the directions in Appendix G of the Administrators PDF. I cannot find the relevant instructions although I am wondering if it can be achieved using rsautil manage-database and resizing the database files. Update - I've found that I was referring to the old documentation for the above problem. Please see my most recent post to resolve this issue.