Windows Gateway Services Configuration Guide - Mule 3

For MSMQ and PowerShell connectors running in the Mule ESB, the service first authenticates the call by inspecting the HTTP Authorization header.

The authentication is done through a unique security token used by both connectors. This token is included on every HTTP request to the Gateway using the Mule scheme.

The following example shows how MSMQ uses the Gateway to connect to a specific queue sending the security token as specified in this section (the same authorization header applies for PowerShell):

The authorization token must match in the connector and the Gateway configuration files. The following configuration setting shows how the token is set within the Gateway configuration file Mule.SelfHost.exe.config:

When you configure the connectors running in the Mule ESB, the authorization token value must be set at the 'Gateway Access Token' configuration setting (accessToken attribute in the connector’s XML configuration).

Users executing the call on behalf of a Gateway-served connector authenticate through two custom HTTP headers, mule-impersonate-username and mule-impersonate-password.

These two headers represent the Windows credentials of an existing user in the Active Directory forest where the Windows Gateway service is running, or a local account on the machine hosting the service. When these HTTP headers are included in an HTTP Request, the Windows Gateway service authenticates and impersonates this user before executing the operation required by the connector. This provides the ability to configure the correct access control list permissions using Windows credentials.

The following diagram shows the interaction of the MSMQ connector with the Gateway, along with the main components used:

The following table contains the configuration settings for MSMQ Connector:

When your queue is marked to require authentication, you can impersonate the caller user as specified in the cleanup-username configuration parameter. In addition to this, if you work with a remote queue the connector has a particular header to override this behavior (for details, check the connector’s guide).

Windows Gateway Services supports running in a load-balanced configuration to enable fault tolerance. When running multiple gateway services instances, each member must be configured to perform MSMQ background jobs at a non-overlapping interval.

MSMQ background job processing is by default performed every 10 minutes starting at zero minutes past the hour. To prevent multiple gateway instances simultaneously attempting to perform cleanup on the queues when running in load-balanced configuration, a setting called cleanup-delay must be specified on each gateway instance. The recommended value to use for this on each machine is (10 / instanceCount) * (instanceNumber - 1) where instanceNumber is an integer value 1..n.

For example:

Synchronize machine clocks by NTP or an equivalent mechanism to ensure this offset is applied correctly.

The cleanup-delay setting is in the Mule.SelfHost.config file:

See MSMQ Connector Release Notes for version information.

For more information on the MSMQ connector, see the 3.9@mule-runtime::msmq-connector.adoc[MSMQ Connector User Guide].

This connector has no specific configuration other than the general configuration in Security Considerations.

See Windows Powershell Connector Release Notes for version information.

For more information on the Window PowerShell connector, see the Windows PowerShell Connector Guide.

In addition to the routing service configuration described in the Configuring Dynamics CRM and AX Connectors section, this connector has specific configuration settings.

The following table contains configuration settings for the CRM connector:

See Microsoft Dynamics CRM Release Notes for version information.

For more information on the CRM connector, see the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Connector Guide.

In addition to the routing service configuration described in the Configuring Dynamics CRM and AX Connectors section, this connector has specific configuration settings.

This table contains the configuration settings for the AX connector:

See Microsoft Dynamics AX Release Notes for version information.

For more information on the AX connector, see the Microsoft Dynamics AX Connector Guide.

The Windows Gateway Services is configured to log Information events. This is configured under the <switches> element. If you want to log everything, you should use the Verbose level, by changing it in the configuration element shown below.

Configure the levels at switch level in the configuration file:

Other possible levels are:

If you want to trace or debug the routing service within the Windows Gateway Services (for CRM and AX connectors), there is a setting that you can enable to get more details about the error that was generated while connecting to the routing service. To get this information at the tracing listeners, enable it using the includeExceptionDetailInFaults attribute from the serviceDebug element. To do this, set its value to true:

This setting extends the error message returned by the service and adds an internal stack trace of the cause, which in some scenarios may help you understand what the issue or problem is.

A useful way to troubleshoot issues is to enable the console listener (by default it is, but if not then you should add it to the listeners section shown above), and run the Windows Gateway Services from command line. Within the console you can see real time information which is being traced, like requests, responses and some warnings/errors. These are useful to see if the connector is reaching the Gateway properly, or other possibles causes that could be generating a fault.

To enable the console listener, in case it is not, you need to add it to the listeners collection:

To run this from the command line, first stop the Anypoint Gateway service, and then go to the folder where it is installed (by default c:\Program Files(x86)\Anypoint Gateway for Windows) and run the Mule.SelfHost.exe application. This starts running a console and displays tracing events within it in real time.

When you are done troubleshooting, close this console and restart the Windows service.

Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) is a very efficient built-in publish and subscribe mechanism for doing event tracing at the kernel level. There is little overhead in using this feature compared to other traditional tracing solutions that rely on I/O for storing the traces in persistence storage such as files or databases. As a built-in mechanism in Windows, many of the operating systems services and components use this feature as well. For that reason, not only can you troubleshoot the application but also many of the OS components involved in the same execution.

In ETW, there are applications publishing events in queues (or providers) and other applications consuming events from those queues in real-time through ETW sessions. When an event is published in a provider, it goes nowhere unless there is a session collecting events on that queue. (The events are not persisted).

The tracing system in .NET includes a trace listener for ETW, EventProviderTraceListener, which you can configure with a session identifier, which ETW uses to collect traces:

In the example, the session is associated with this identifier:
{47EA5BF3-802B-4351-9EED-7A96485323AC}