The Siebel Gateway Name Server

A Siebel Enterprise may consist of dozens of Siebel Servers, each running dozens of components—programs which implement a specific functionality. Each of these components has different parameter values. In order to easily manage all this information across the entire Enterprise, Siebel has developed the Gateway Name Server. It is a service or daemon process that stores the entire enterprise configuration in a text file named siebns.dat, hence the official name of the file is "Enterprise Configuration Store".

In order to understand the role of the Gateway Name Server properly, we can examine the following scenario:

A Siebel administrator stops all Siebel services. He then tries to start the Siebel Servers without starting the Gateway Name Server. An error message indicates that the Siebel Server could not start.

This is because the only piece of information that a Siebel Server has at the moment of startup is the hostname of a Gateway Name Server, which it immediately tries to contact in order to retrieve more configuration information.

So, the Gateway Name Server is a critical component of the Siebel Web Architecture because it must be present when any Siebel Server starts up or configuration changes have to be applied. However, if the Gateway Name Server fails during normal operation, end users and external systems will still be able to access the Siebel applications and functionality provided by the Siebel Servers. But, it is of course a good idea to monitor the Gateway Name Server and bring it back to life as soon as possible if it should fail.