Notification service does not work (Connection timed out or similar)

Symptom

Various parts of the FME Server Notification Service don't function as expected. For example:

• FTP Watcher doesn't create notifications when new files are uploaded to the FTP site
• Topic monitoring doesn't display notifications to a topic
• IMAP publisher doesn't create notifications for incoming emails, even though other email clients report new mail

Log files for the Notification Service are located at

<FMEServerSystemShare>\resources\Logs\core\current\publishers

or

<FMEServerSystemShare>\resources\Logs\core\current\subscribers

. With further investigation of these log files, you may notice error messages such as

Mon-27-Jul-2815 83:39:16 PM ERROR main 801004 : An error occurred while trying to connect to the FTP server "ftp.safe.com", publication "ftp1" did not start. java.lang.IllegalStateException: Client not connected

or

java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out: connect

For the Topic Monitoring page, you may see an error such as

websocket connection to 'ws://<servername>:7078/websocket' failed: Error in connection establishment: net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT

in the F12 Developer Tools console (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer).

Cause

These types of error are likely due to a firewall configuration issue.

• If the connection is blocked between FME Server and the service with which it is trying to communicate, connections will be reported as blocked or timed out in the notification service log files
• If the WebSocket service on FME Server is blocked (i.e. incoming traffic on port 7078 is not allowed on the FME Server machine) there will be errors reported on the client side when attempting topic monitoring

Resolution

The exact resolution will depend on how the firewall is implemented on your system, and whether communication is being blocked on the FME Server system or on the service it is trying to connect to. Allowing the connection may involve adding a rule for

• incoming communication from the FME Server machine connect based on its IP address
• incoming communication on port 7078 on the FME Server host for the topic monitoring issue
• outgoing communication on a specific remote port (21 for FTP, 993 for secure IMAP etc.)