RDBMS Synchronization

[magurwara]

The user guide for ACS for Windows ver4.0 states that Cisco ACS can use RDBMS to synchronize its database with a third party RDBMS system and only one primary ACS server needs to interact with the third party system and the other ACSs in the network can be updated by this primary ACS using RDBMS synchronization.

However, like many other features that suppose to work (e.g. domain stripping for MS AD) this too does not seem to work and there is no detailed documentation on how it actually does it.

The procedure stated in user guide fails and there are gaps in the documentation.

Can someone refer to any documentation other than the User Guide for instructions/details of this functionality?

Thanks in advance.

[darpotter]

I think the easiest solution is to have a single ACS that is populated via RDBMS Sync. This ACS becomes the replication "master" that then pushes its config down to a set of "slaves".

That is the easiest method but replication is a destructive write onto the slave - so you may choose not to do this.

An alternative is to use the Sync Partners config (part of RDBMS Sync) which attemtps to process actions in the sync table on multiple ACSs. For this to work you need the "other" ACSs to have the RDBMS Sync'ing ACS server in their network config db.

You need to make sure that ACS can write to the transaction table too (note CSV datasources no good) in case one of the other ACSs is down.

If you're having problems check the rdbms sync CSV & service log on the "master" ACS and the csauth service log on the "slave" for errors.