Do connection retry options work?

Question

In our load-balanced Access Manager setup, we often see the following error messages in the debug log file amAuthLDAP and this at times leads to operation failures.
netscape.ldap.LDAPException: Server or network error (81); Cannot contact LDAP server
at netscape.ldap.LDAPConnThread.networkError(LDAPConnThread.java:687)
at netscape.ldap.LDAPConnThread.run(LDAPConnThread.java:479)
To get rid of this error message, we were tweaking with the following property values in AMConfig.properties:
com.iplanet.am.event.connection.num.retries=3
com.iplanet.am.event.connection.delay.between.retries=3000
com.iplanet.am.event.connection.ldap.error.codes.retries=80,81,91
But from the debug log files, it appears that Access Manager does not retry opening a new connection!
Is this a bug in Access Manager?
Or are we missing something?
TIA,
Chetan

Answer 1

The LDAP authentication module uses an LDAP connection pool to contact the specified Directory Server.
If some of the connections has not been used for some while i�m pretty sure that the LB drops the idle TCP connection (of course without telling neither the client nor the server).
Have you tried to set the nsslapd-idletimeout of the DS below the one of the LB - this should resolve the issue.