JasonSamuel.com

I recently troubleshot an issue where cookie persistency was not working properly when failing over from the active node to the passive node in a Citrix Netscaler HA cluster (high availability cluster). I found the issue was that if the date and time on your appliances are not the same, the cookie will be invalid causing persistency to fail when failing over to the passive node. That’s a big issue because all your users will lose their sessions during a failover.

To quickly check your appliances:

1. SSH using Putty into your NSIPs of your Netscalers.

2. Type “shell” to enter the FreeBSD shell

3. Type “date” to see the current date, time, and time zone. Both your Netscalers should be identical.

4. If they are not identical, set the time by typing the current date and time in the following format:

date yymmddhhmm.ss

For example, to set the date to June 28, 2010 12:13 PM with 15 seconds left in the minute:

date 1006281213.45

You will get this result if you are successful:

Mon Jun 28 12:13:45 CST 2010

5. Now if your timezone says GMT or something instead of your correct time zone, then you need to navigate to timezone file directories by typing:

cd /usr/share/zoneinfo

6. Type this to list all the different zone folders:

ls -l

7. To set the timezone, copy your timezone file to the localtime folder. Below, I am setting the timezone to CST (Central Standard Time):

cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Chicago /etc/localtime

8. Now just type “date” again and it should be the correct time, date, and timezone. That’s it, you’re done! Let me know if you run into any trouble.