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):

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:

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.