To support failover, several Windchill configuration changes are needed.

Examples of the changes are included in the following subsections that describe the changes. These examples assume that you are currently using a Directory server on host server1.mycompany.com that is listening on port 6389 and that you have set up replication among three Directory server servers as follows:

The failover capability in Windchill is based on the failover capability in the Java JNDI layer. All traffics are directed to the first server as long as it remains available. If the first server becomes unavailable, LDAP requests are directed to the second server in the list, and so on. Servers should be placed in the list in the order you want the servers to be used. For example, the fastest LDAP servers should probably be earlier in the list.

The JNDI adapter entries are held in the JSON configuration files and are used by Windchill to access services such as LDAP.

After starting the Info*Engine Administration utility, you should see the adapters described previously, as well as other adapters. Open each adapter you want to change and change the Provider URL value. The single LDAP URL should be changed to a blank-separated LDAP URL list, where the URLs are listed in the order you want the servers to be used.

From the example configuration described previously, assume the value of the Provider URL is initially set to:

Change the value of the Provider URL to the following. Edit as appropriate for your configuration and enter on one line:

You can detect this case by comparing the provider URLs of the Ldap and EnterpriseLdap adapters. If the enterprise adapter has a different provider URL that points to an enterprise directory, it should not be modified.

Next, update the servlet baseUri. From the Services column of the Info*Engine Administration main page, open the entry ending in servlet. Expand the Property Administrator Properties and click Edit to change the base URI. This value should already contain an LDAP URL with an appropriate search base. Simply append the following string (edited as appropriate for your LDAP servers):

Click OK to apply the change.

To update Windchill properties, use the xconfmanager utility to update the <Windchill>/site.xconf file. PTC recommends you make a backup copy of the site.xconf file before making changes to it.

You must create a set of properties related to the ie.ldap.serverHostName and ie.ldap.serverPort properties to establish the host name and port for each Directory server that is being used for LDAP failover. Assuming ie.ldap.serverHostName is already set to server1.mycompany.com and ie.ldap.serverPort is already set to 6389 from the previous example, these two properties do not need to be changed. However, additional hosts and ports can be specified by appending a .1, .2, and so on to these property names. Open a Windchill shell, and use the following commands to make the changes corresponding to the previous example. Enter each command on one line:

Optionally, since you are using the default LDAP port of 389 for server2.mycompany.com, you can omit the property definition for ie.ldap.serverPort.1.

Additionally, you must change the wt.federation.ie.ldapServer property. For example, enter the following on one line:

Finally, apply your changes to the corresponding properties files by entering the following command:

Apache-based web servers allow you to configure a failover list of LDAP URLs. If you are using a web server other than an Apache-based web server, refer to the appropriate documentation to determine if LDAP failover is supported. If failover is supported, determine how it should be configured.

From a Windchill shell, navigate to the Apache-based web server installation directory (if using the bundled HTTP Server, the installation directory is HTTPServer). Then enter Ant commands similar to the following to modify the server names and ports, the search base DN, and the bindDN and password for your configuration. Enter each command on one line:

For information about other HTTP Server configuration options, see Configuring PTC HTTP Server and PTC Embedded Servlet Engine With Other Options.