Cisco WAAS – weird error when trying to register WAEs to the central manager

When working on a WAE 500 (I know, this is really old hardware), I ran into an issue when trying to register with the central manager (CM):

waas-edge#sh cms info
Device registration information :
Device Id                            = 216
Device registered as                 = WAAS Application Engine
Current WAAS Central Manager         = 10.1.1.200
Registered with WAAS Central Manager = 10.1.1.3
Status                               = Pending(CM is busy, retry later)
Time of last config-sync             = Fri Feb  5 09:20:12 2010            

CMS services information :
Service cms_ce is running
waas-edge#

Here’s how I resolved it!

First, all of the WAEs in the environment were running WAAS 4.1.1c.  The plan was to get everything registered to the CM, then upgrade them to WAAS 4.1.3b, then upgrade to WAAS 4.1.5c (the final, latest-and-greatest version available today).

The problem was that the device wasn’t showing up in the GUI at all.  It appeared to register, but not according to the CM GUI (I couldn’t see the device registered in the CM GUI at all).  Searching the Internet came up with nothing, so I was trying to figure out how to resolve it.  I left the device alone for awhile (overnight) and it didn’t resolve itself (thinking maybe it was a timing issue).

Looking at the logs on the CM (Admin -> Logs -> System Messages), I found the following:

Both of those messages were shown for both WAEs that couldn’t register.  Unfortunately I couldn’t find any other info on where to go (searching for these message codes resulted in nothing as well).

So, to resolve it, I went into the acceleration baseline group (Configure -> Acceleration -> Baseline Group) and turned off all acceleration features (Configure -> Acceleration -> Enabled Features).  After doing this (and making what appeared to be some other minor changes), it is working!

To re-register the WAE, I performed the following:

waas-edge#conf t
waas-edge(config)#no cms enable
management services stopped
waas-edge(config)#exit
waas-edge#cms deregister force
Deregistering WAE when Disk Encryption and/or Secure Store is enabled, recovery of encrypted data will not be possible. Do you really want to continue. (yes|no) [no]?yes
Deregistration requires management service to be stopped.
You will have to manually start it. Stopping management service on this node...
management services are already disabled.
Failed to contact CM(Unmarshaled: 9001). Please check connectivity with CM device and status of management service on CM.
Deregistration has errors but still proceeding since force is requested.
Please resolve these errors in the CM UI once deregistration is completed.
Removing cms database tables.
Deregistration complete
. Please preserve current cli configuration using 'copy running-config startup-config' command because CMS service has been disabled.
waas-edge#conf t
waas-edge(config)#cms enable
Registering WAAS Application Engine...
Sending  device registration request to Central Manager with address 10.1.1.200
Please wait, initializing CMS tables
Successfully initialized CMS tables
Registration complete.
Please preserve running configuration using 'copy running-config startup-config'.
Otherwise management service will not be started on reload and node will be shown
'offline' in WAAS Central Manager UI.
management services enabled
waas-edge(config)#exit
waas-edge#copy run start
waas-edge#

After this, the device showed up in the CM GUI!  For some reason, I’m guessing that the CIFS acceleration is messed up.  I’m going to proceed with upgrading the WAEs and then try re-enabling the accelerations, hoping that it works.  Hopefully this will be helpful to someone who runs into the same issue.