Cannot establish HTTP connection

Recently I had a problem with a WebEx PeopleSoft setup.  Users testing in a development environment were reporting they got the following error “Cannot establish HTTP connection (158,2842)”.  I tried pinging one of the external nodes used for WebEx.  I also received “Cannot establish HTTP connection”.  The URL defined on the node looked OK, and I could hit it from the server.  It was an HTTPS URL and the browser validated the certificate, so I decided to look at the SSL Keystore configuration in the integrationGateway.properties file.  There I found the answer.

In the integrationGateway.properties file there are two values for the keystore. secureFileKeystorePath, which is the full path to the pskey keystore file and secureFileKeystorePasswd, which is the password to the pskey keystore file

By default the password in this file is delivered unencrypted.  However starting with PeopleTools 8.50 (I think it was) it’s now mandatory to encrypt the password. In this case, for whatever reason, we still had the unencrypted default password.

You can use PSCipher.sh or PSCipher.bat on the command line to get the encrypted string or you can make the change online in the Gateway Setup Properties using the Advanced Properties Page.  The password encryption tool is built into the bottom of the page.