Testing installations with Management Station

If you installed Management Station, you can use it to verify the success of the entire installation by logging in, creating a Nuance Network of managed resources, and starting the services running on the hosts as follows:

  1. Open a browser window and enter the URL http://MS_hostname:8080/mserver. The MS_hostname can be a name or IP address.
  2. Log in to Management Station with Administrator (user) and changeit (password). Change to a more secure password when prompted.

  3. Note: As a security precaution, the Management Station locks out a user after five unsuccessful login attempts. To resolve this situation, see Managing users.

  4. Select Nuance Network in the left frame to display the Add Network Element page.

    The hosts that this Management Station is managing appear in the left frame under Available Resources. They were configured to point to this Management Station during the installation.

  5. Select Host from the Type menu.
  6. Select a role from the Role menu and then select a host under Resource.

    Resources are hosts configured during installation that you manage using Management Station. A role configures the host to run certain services, as explained in Roles.

    Note: If you select a role that assigns Dragon Voice services, it's important that you review and, if necessary, configure the required service properties or the services can fail to start. See Configuring Dragon for Management Station.

    For example, to choose an "all-in-one" role that runs all services:

    For example, to choose a role that runs the standard set of Nuance speech software (Speech Server, Recognizer, and Vocalizer):

    Note: If you don’t see any hosts, you may have to start the watcher service on these hosts, or you may not have configured them to point to this Management Station. See Configuring a standby Management Station.

  7. Click Add Network Element. The selected host moves from Available Resources to Nuance Network.
  8. Make sure the host is selected in the network view, then select Services from the toolbar.
  9. Click Start All to start all services on the selected host. If all services start without errors, the installation was successful.
  10. Continue to Managing Nuance Networks for instructions on performing these tasks with Management Station:
    • Configure your Nuance Network with additional hosts running speech services.
    • Configure service initialization.
    • Start, stop, and restart services.
    • Receive alarms from services.
    • Generate reports.

Solution: create a symbolic link:

cd /usr/lib64
ln -s libnsl.so.2 libnsl.so.1

You must run ZooKeeper before starting the Nuance Resource Manager and Dragon Voice engines. Otherwise, Management Station displays alarms as Dragon Voice engines attempt to register. If services still do not start, reboot the host, which restarts the services, and make sure that ZooKeeper is running.

On Linux: You might notice that some services fail to start, appear twice, or appear under the wrong host. You can modify the etc/hosts file for a host experiencing these problems.

You must install at least one language pack for Nuance Recognizer, a voice pack for Nuance Vocalizer, and a data pack for the Krypton engine. If you did not install languages/voices/data packs during the installation process, you can download, extract, and install them now.

Note: If you install Speech Suite on a Krypton/NTpE host without a data pack, you must stop the watcher service before installing the first data pack. (Otherwise, the required NDP_HOME environment variable will not be set.) For instructions on manually starting and stopping services, see Starting and stopping the watcher service manually.

You must set full permissions on directories where logs are written to disk. Otherwise, services fail to start because they can’t begin logging. Set permissions on the NUANCE_DATA_DIR directory, the parent location for all logging.

To check the permissions:

  1. Open Explorer.
  2. Right-click the %NUANCE_DATA_DIR% directory and select Properties.
  3. Select the Security tab.

    The Name box must contain one of either "Everyone" or "SYSTEM" with full permissions (all Allow boxes must be checked).

  4. If either of these names aren’t named, then click Add.
  5. Choose Entire Directory for the Look In: field.
  6. Add either of these names and click OK.

To check the permissions, log in as root and set full permissions on $NUANCE_DATA_DIR; by default, var/local/Nuance. For example: 

> chmod -R 755 NUANCE_DATA_DIR

It’s important that only the root user have full permission to avoid allowing other users to modify files.

Due to a possible Linux operating system installation problem, you may notice some services fail to start, or they may appear twice or under the wrong host in Management Station tree view. Follow these steps:

  1. Open the /etc/hosts file.
  2. Change the following line: 
    127.0.0.1   hostname   localhost.localdomain

    To:

    127.0.0.1   localhost  localhost.localdomain
    ipAddresshostname

    Where:

    ipAddress is the IP address of the managed host

    hostname is the name of the managed host

    For example:

    127.0.0.1   localhost   localhost.localdomain
    11.2.3.4    myhost
  3. Restart Management Station services. See Starting and stopping Management Station manually. You might also want to restart the watcher service on the managed host. See Starting and stopping the watcher service manually.

If the Management Station fails to detect hosts where a Nuance product was installed, verify the following:

  • Check for any network problems. Is a connection down? Has the network configuration changed?
  • Verify that the watcher service is running on these hosts. This service (which runs as a Windows service or Unix daemon) initiates and maintains connectivity with Management Station. If necessary, restart the watcher service.

    Windows: Use the Windows Services Control Panel (Administrative Tools→Services→Nuance Watcher Daemon).

    Linux: Determine whether the watcher service is running. If it is not, log in as root and start it. Commands:

    > ps -ef | grep watcher

    On CentOS 7 and above or Red Hat 7 and above:

    > systemctl start nuance-watcher
  • Verify the information in the mserver_hosts.txt file.

    Windows: Display the file with Start→All Programs→ Nuance Voice Platform→Configure Management Station Addresses

    Linux: Open the mserver_hosts.txt file, located in $NUANCE/data/oam:

    • Is the hostname for Management Station correct?
    • Is the hostname resolvable by the network? Depending on your network settings you may need to specify the IP address of the Management Station host instead of the hostname.
    • If you have changed the IP address on any Linux host, make sure to update the /etc/hosts system file with the change; otherwise, the host may appear offline to Management Station. Restart the watcher service on these hosts and the Management Station service afterward: 

      On CentOS 7 and above or Red Hat 7 and above:

      > systemctl restart nuance-watcher
  • Management Station will not be able to communicate with hosts that are named using non-standard characters, including the underscore (_). Only alphanumeric characters and the dash (-) character are allowed for Internet host names. The period is allowed for delimiting components of domain style names. See rfc952.txt.
  • Does this file contain multiple Management Station addresses? Only one connection can be active. Ensue the primary Management Station is first in the list. (Once a host connects to a secondary Management Station, it does not attempt to connect to the primary.)

Problem: when you restart the Management Station, the Resource Manager sends alarms that some services are not operational.

A common cause is that the Management Station becomes operational before the services (for example, after a system reboot), and the Resource Manager sends pings to the services while they are initializing.

Solution: extend the delay time to prevent the Resource Manager from sending pings too quickly. This allows the services to complete their initialization and reduces the chance of an unnecessary alarm. See these properties: 

This topic is about a potential problem with the Management Station interface where the display of charts is confused by missing fonts. It's relevant when you install the following software on a host:

  • Management Station
  • OpenJDK
  • CentOS

Management Station requires default fonts (from the operating system) to render charts for various report in the GUI. If the fonts are missing, the display is unreadable or shows signs of corruption.

This procedure detects the problem:

  1. Install fontconfig to enable the fc command: 
    yum install fontconfig
  2. Detect the installed fonts: 
    fc-list

    If there's no list, there are no fonts installed.

The Management Station installation includes a font package to remedy this problem. Follow this procedure:

  1. Enter these commands:
    cp $MSTATION_HOME/mserver/webapps/mserver/fonts/mstation-default-fonts.tar.gz /usr/share/fonts/.
    cd /usr/share/fonts/
    gunzip /mstation-default-fonts.tar.gz
    tar xvf mstation-default-fonts.tar
    rm -rf mstation-default-fonts.tar.gz
  2. Detect the newly installed fonts:

    fc-list

    The command should return a list similar to this: 

    Liberation Sans:style=Regular
    Liberation Sans:style=Bold
    Liberation Sans:style=Bold Italic
    Liberation Sans:style=Italic
  3. Restart the Management Station service:

    service initScriptsmserver.sh restart

Setting up support for HTTPS/WSS involves industry-standard mechanisms that are not controlled by the Nuance Speech Suite installation. For some basic instructions see: