Server Drain, Maintenance, and Auto-Restart

(High availability requires EFT Enterprise.) Draining the server provides for graceful shutdown and transition between EFT and HA nodes. Drain mode halts any NEW incoming connections and HA Event Rule activity for all Sites on a specific node. Transfers and events in progress would continue to operate until completion. When in drain mode, the node relinquishes mastership and the master stops delegating events to the drained node. If a certain node/server is expected to restart (for example, after Windows updates), administrators can preemptively manually drain the node before the expected restart. In this way, all traffic is routed to and kicked off on the other nodes not paused. After the Windows update/maintenance of the node, traffic and event rule activity will resume normally.

Limitations

  • The WTC will deny uploads for any pending transfers on nodes that are in drain mode; in-progress transfers will be permitted to complete (unless drain timeout occurs).

  • When EFT enters drain mode, it denies all future connections. scClient may do some GET requests when a file completes upload during drain to obtain a refreshed directory listing. EFT will deny these requests and issue an error. These errors can be ignored; all uploads in progress will continue until completion or until drain timeout occurs.

To enable drain mode manually

  1. In the EFT administration interface, click File > Drain Server (or the COM API method, ICIServer::DrainServer). A message appears asking if you want to restart the server service after draining.

  2. Click Yes to automatically restart; click No if you want to restart later.

Auto-Drain

Auto-Drain takes effect automatically when an HA node detects that it is out of sync and a restart is required. The server engages Drain mode (waits for transfers and events to complete) and then automatically restarts the node to regain sync with the cluster.

The administrator can configure the time before drain takes effect, and the time it will allow for transfer and processes to complete, and can disable drain completely, if wanted.

Refer to https://kb.globalscape.com/KnowledgebaseArticle11391.aspx for the overrides pertaining to Server Drain, Maintenance, and Auto-Restart