Remote file services

Configuration documents describe the available application servers, their configurations, and their contents. Two file services manage configuration documents: the file transfer service and the file synchronization service.

The file services do the following:

File transfer service

The file transfer service enables the moving of files between the network manager and the nodes. It uses the HTTP protocol to transfer files. When you enable security in the WebSphere Application Server product, the file transfer service uses certificate-based mutual authentication. You can use the default key files in a test environment. Ensure that you change the default key file to secure your system.

The ports used for file transfer are defined in the Network Deployment server configuration under its WebContainer HTTP transports.

File synchronization service

The file synchronization service ensures that a file set on each node matches that on the deployment manager node. This service promotes consistent configuration data across a cell. You can adjust several configuration settings to control file synchronization on individual nodes and throughout a system.

This service runs in the deployment manager and node agents, and ensures that configuration changes made to the cell repository are propagated to the appropriate node repositories. The cell repository is the master repository, and configuration changes made to node repositories are not propagated up to the cell. During a synchronization operation a node agent checks with the deployment manager to see if any configuration documents that apply to the node have been updated. New or updated documents are copied to the node repository, and deleted documents are removed from the node repository.

The default behavior, which is enabled, is for each node agent to periodically run a synchronization operation. You can configure the interval between operations or disable the periodic behavior. You can also configure the synchronization service to synchronize a node repository before starting a server on the node.

Related concepts
Configuration documents
Node agents