Question

Forms DMZ Submissions - Failed Submission Handling

Forms Security

Updated November 16, 2021

asked on November 15, 2021

Hello,

Quick question - we have a customer who has Forms set up in a DMZ. They have done this using the "high security variation: two forms servers, two sql servers" approach as described in the whitepaper here.

We've recently had an issue where the internal server went down, and was down for a couple of hours - however the public facing/DMZ server was still functional. During this period some forms were submitted by anonymous users.

I'm assuming that because the DMZ database isn't configured to store data that these submissions will simply be lost and have to be re-done? Although this is a little annoying it does sense to me, as you ideally don't want to be storing potentially sensitive data on the DMZ server in case of a breach, but just wanted to confirm this is the case?

Many thanks!

Dan

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Answer

SELECTED ANSWER

replied on November 16, 2021

Depends on what version of Forms you are currently using, you can follow 1 or 2 to recovery the submissions for your case:

1. If you are using a version before Forms 11, the submission files will be archived under the C:\ProgramData\Laserfiche Forms\RoutingError folder on the DMZ Forms machine. You can check whether there are files under such folder from the folder properties. Then you can copy the folder to the internal Forms machine to merge with the existing files under C:\ProgramData\Laserfiche Forms\RoutingError folder, and restart Routing Service to trigger the submission recovery.

2. If you are using Forms 11, you can check whether there are entries in the submission_recovery table from the DMZ database, if so, you need to copy the data for the date_saved,unique_id ,xml_content columns and insert to the internal database submission_recovery table as new entry, the the Routing Service in the internal Forms server will process it automatically without restart it.

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replied on November 16, 2021

Great thanks Xiuhong, that's worked perfectly for us and is very useful to know for future reference!

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replied on November 15, 2021

I'm not exactly sure of the answer to your question, but I do know that with the standard DMZ configuration that if the primary server goes down or the connection is somehow interrupted that submissions are still allowed, but will be put in a RoutingError folder and stored as an XML file. Those files at some point will be picked up and sent to the Primary Forms server. I would assume that is how it works in the high security setup as well, but I am not positive.

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replied on November 16, 2021

Hi Blake, thanks for your reply! I've just had a look in the folder C:\Program Files\Laserfiche\Forms\RoutingError on the DMZ server and internal server but there doesn't appear to be anything under either, and the submissions still aren't showing up in the internal Forms instance. Maybe it does work differently for the high security setup.

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