Technical Tip: How to handle session timeouts while running the FortiSOAR upgrade

[nmathur]

Description

This article describes how to handle session timeouts where network connectivity is less than favorable.

Before executing the FortiSOAR Upgrade installer, ensure that the SSH session does not time out. The SSH session could timeout as generally, the timeout set for an SSH session is 5 minutes, and the FortiSOAR upgrade can take up to 15-20 minutes, depending on the data volume.

This also ensures the session runs smoothly even if the terminal session gets deactivated. 

Solution

To ensure that the session does not timeout while running the FortiSOAR upgrade installer, it is possible to choose one of the following methods:

Change the session timeout value in the tool such as Putty that you use to ssh to the VM.  

OR

Use the 'screen' command (releases prior to FortiSOAR 7.3.0) or the 'tmux' command (releases after FortiSOAR 7.3.0) command to maintain the session until it is manually terminated.

Using 'tmux':
- To check a tmux session, run the following command:

# tmux ls

This command returns an output such as the following example:

0: 1 windows (created Thu Nov 24 09:37:47 2022) [170x47]

Log back into the ssh console and run the following command to reattach the tmux session:

tmux attach-session -t 0

- Using 'screen':

To check a screen session, run the following command:

# screen -ls

To install 'screen', run the following command:

# yum install -y screen

To start 'screen' run the following command:

# screen

OR

# screen -S <screenname>

To restore the session, run the following command:

# screen -r XXXX <----- Where XXXX is the last session ID of the last screen.