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Intermittent Port Issues Affecting Materials Studio and Schrodinger Software
If you are obtaining error messages or warnings related to licenses not accessible or similar, the info below should be useful. The nmap tests may also be useful to you anyway.
Initially please note there could be an issue with your network or associated firewall. Ports may be inaccessible owing your network. You can test on other available networks including mobile, wifi or wired ones.
We apologise that there are been intermittent issues with the ports for Materials Studio (MS) and Schrodinger which we are trying to understand and resolve. Communication between your PC and the servers/gateway can be problematic, with issues occurring more often with MS than with Schrodinger. For MS, this issue might also affect the job info you see and/or the downloading of your calculation results/data from the gateway to your PC/client.
The port numbers are as follows:
MS: 1715, 1740, 1888 and 18890
Schrodinger: 27008 and 53000
The issue is intermittent with the ports being open (working) for an interval of time and filtered (blocked/failing) for an interval of time. These time intervals (working and failing) are not consistent and vary usually between 5 and 20 mins, although the working intervals can sometimes luckily be a lot longer.
Users can try access their software every few mins for 20 to 30 mins, and you'll hopefully find a working interval.
In order to check whether your PC can see the ports or not (open or filtered) you can use the procedure using nmap described below.
The screenshot below shows usage of nmap within the software Zenmap. Zenmap is free software in Windows (shown) and there is also a (free) Mac version. In this current example, one can see the port is open (working) and a latency time is also shown (good news). If one sees filtered this means the port is blocked. The command being run is checking port 1740:
nmap -p 1740 -Pn mslogin.chpc.ac.za
There are options to run nmap including Zenmap:
- Zenmap
- Linux terminal/shell - on a Linux PC, an emulator, MobaXterm session.
- Mac IOS Shell
- DOS command prompt on Windows may work
- WSL in Windows
- NMAP Wrapper in Android
