About five years ago we got a Cisco NAC appliance to allow guests wireless access. System has worked thus far and after so many years of no issues now, all of the sudden, we get a blank white page when you go to the sponsor pages or to admin pages. As you may know, support for this system is limited and no further development is done by Cisco.
I want to help others if they are still running this system on the problem we faced and how we fixed it.
Issue: Guest NAC shows a blank white page when going to https://localhost/ or to https://localhost/admin page. Restarting the appliance does not help and you can't get into GUI to see any information or modify settings. Guest auth may or may not still work.
Problem: The CIsco Guest NAC appliance comes with it's own database system of postagre. On your first install of the appliance few commands were issued to create a database called gapdb and access allowed by user postgres. Once the database was created a guest.sql file created tables and set values inside table as needed.
During the install your log table is created as such:
CREATE TABLE log (
id integer DEFAULT nextval('log_id_seq'::regclass) NOT NULL,
serverip text,
datestamp timestamp with time zone DEFAULT now(),
username text NOT NULL,
sitesect text,
"action" text,
audittype text,
client_ip inet,
file text,
line integer,
priority integer,
component text,
server_ip inet,
get_data text,
query_string text,
post_data text,
subject_id bigint
);
The id colum is an integer and it's a system generated sequence number invoking the nextval() function with sequence name of log_id_seq. Within the log files of postgres at /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_log/(last logfile) you will notice the following error message: ERROR: integer out of range
This error message is thrown because the integer you are using is not within the allowed range. We learned that the largest table in our database was the logs table and it's ID column had valued very close to or exactly at 2,147,483,647 <-- Very large number.
Solution: The problem is exactly that the integer value cannot go over a value of 2,147,483,647. If logs can't get written to the log table then it seems the entire operation stops working. The only option that we could apply without losing existing guest information was to change the sequence number value back to 1 so it restarts as if it was just installed.
To achieve this do the following:
Get to root shell of your Cisco Guest NAC appliance.
Login to the postgresql shell by issuing the following command:
psql -d gapdb -U postgres
At the gapdb=# promt enter the following:
ALTER SEQUENCE log_id_seq START WITH 1;
If everything works you will get a message that says ALTER SEQUENCE
To verify if your id column in the log table is now set to 1 do the following
SELECT * FROM log WHERE id < 10;
If values are returned then note the id column integer values as it should be 1,2,3....
Test your web access and you should be good to go.
You can exit the postgres shell by entering \q
I am hoping our trial and errors are helpful to those in need. We have spent numerous days trying to figure this issue out and I hate to see someelse go through it because it was painful.
