Universal Messaging server behind NGINX

Universal Messaging server behind NGINX Product Versions: Universal Messaging & IS from 10.5 fix 8 onwards

Introduction

NGINX AS PROXY SERVER FOR UM

This section covers the NGINX configuration for serving UM http requests and its detailed description.

To begin with, let’s consider a very basic setup where we expose a NGINX server port which is configured on um server settings. Clients who want to connect will be making requests to the NGINX server instead of UM directly. NGINX server takes care of redirection to the UM server

Below are the configuration that one needs to consider while configuring UM behind load bealnacer.

    events {
    worker_connections 1024;
}
http {
    default_type application/octet-stream;  
    #Log Settings
    log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                  '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                  '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    #create logs directory in /etc/nginx path before configuring these otherwise you can use default directory #path /var/log/nginx to configure error and access logs
    access_log logs/access.log;
    error_log logs/error.log warn;

    # Server will close idle connection after this timeout.
    keepalive_timeout 300s;

    # number of requests client can make over single connection.
    keepalive_requests 1000000;

    # This is a must, since UM client is currently sending: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; #Windows NT 5.0) and default 'msie6' matches this and causes nginx to close UM client connections
    keepalive_disable none;

    upstream umbackend {
        server localhost:11000;

        # maximum number of keep alive connections to maintain to each upstream server
        keepalive 100;
        # Server will close idle connection after this timeout.
        keepalive_timeout 300s;

        # number of requests client can make over single connection.
        keepalive_requests 1000000;     
    }

server {
        listen 80;
        server_name loadbalancer;
        # Important - nginx must continuously send data to UM client rather than buffering it
        proxy_buffering off;

        location / {
            proxy_pass http://umbackend;
            #Important - configure proxy http 1.1 protocol version to enable connection      
            #keep-alive and rewrite Connection header
            proxy_http_version 1.1;
            proxy_set_header Connection "";     
          }
     }

}

Required UM Configurations Details

Load the configuration and start the nginx server

If you want to test on your NGINX set-up for your UM server, use the above configuration. Update proxy_pass with your running UM server’s HTTP Interface and update this in your /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file and start the server.

In the above configuration serves static files over HTTP on port 80 from the directory / opt/softwareag/UniversalMessaging/doc/ [opt/softwareag is installation directory, you can configure to serve your own static file as well.]

nginx -s reload

Use the reload method of NGINX to achieve a graceful reload of the configuration without stopping the server

All the requests from clients which contains um1 in its URL segment, are forwarded to the proxied server which is defined in umbackend upstream.i.e umserver which is running locally on port 11000

Sample-Program to validate

Check out the full post in the Software AG Tech Community the to see the Sample-program to validate.

Things to consider if there are dedicated servers configured based on the URL pattern

for example:

server {
listen 80;
server_name loadbalancer;
proxy_buffering off;
location = / umserver1 {
proxy_pass http://um1;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Connection “”;
}
location = /umserver2 {
proxy_pass http://um2;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Connection “”;
}
location = /umserver3 {
proxy_pass http://um3;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_set_header Connection “”;
}
}

As you can see , if you have set the directive location with the some specific pattern
one has to use url as follows to connect to nginx
i.e nhp://nginxhost:nginxport/umserver1, nhp://nginxhost:nginxport/umserver2, nhp://nginxhost:nginxport/umserver3

but if you are using the client below the version below 10.5 you must have to use the URL with extra slash in order to work. i.e
nhp://nginxhost:nginxport//umserver1, nhp://nginxhost:nginxport//umserver2, nhp://nginxhost:nginxport//umserver3

For more details such as configuring with secured socket layer please visit the original post in the Software AG Tech Community where you will find a document on
Configuring UM behind NGINX Server (part 2).