Older ZoneDirectors won't connect to 9.12.2 FM

[michael_marley_]

Hello,

First question here so be gentle. 🙂

I am doing some testing with a VM running the latest 9.12.2 Flexmaster software.  I have also installed our wildcard cert successfully.  Unfortunately it seems that older ZDs, such as 9.0 and 9.1 won't connect at all when connecting them to this FM VM.

For practical reasons we cannot upgrade all these ZDs that are in the field and are looking at a way to make this work so we can use vanity URLs for our client sites using our wildcard cert.

I just can't seem to figure out a way to troubleshoot or debug this dilemma and I was hoping you can shed some light on this. For these clients our reach doesn't really extend beyond warping in to the ZDs and changing the FM url to point to our test box.

A huge thank you in advance for your attention to this matter.

Michael M

[michael_marley_]

Hello Michael.

Thanks for chiming in. I believe you actually work very closely with my company and I was hoping you would chime in. We have thousands of sites and are really looking to ease management for ourselves and our clients. Being able to use our wildcard cert across our FMs is a key part of what we are trying to accomplish.

I am just looking for a way we can debug/troubleshoot this as there seems to be very little that can be gleamed from any obvious log.  For instance - when I change the FM url in the zd all I see in the log is that the fm has been changed.  I see nothing about it not actually connecting successfully, which also means I have nothing further to look at.

Surely there must be some way to actually see what is failing behind the scenes to enable further investigation.  Thanks and I look forward to finding a resolution for this.

[michael_brado]

Hi Michael,

   I'm glad you're a long time customer, and if FM is key to your business, please open a TAC case
to get this into our system for tracking. The official stance has always been to support two ZD versions
back from FM, so the older versions are not "officially" supported might be the bottom line.  Perhaps
FM audit logs and ZD syslogs might be helpful to explore ZD visibility/certificate exchange, but will take
deeper investigation.   
  Number two, if you are using FM extensively, do you have a physical server installation of FM 9.12.2,
rather than the VM installation?  I would be interested to know if the platform was in any way a factor.
Hopefully, our FM product manager might be following this thread, if they have further input.  Thanks.

[michael_marley_]

Thank you Michael. I have opened a case for this.