000012793 - Meta key names are being truncated with error message 'key exceeds maximum size of 16' in RSA Security Analytics

(W) 2010-Jul-17 18:57:48 [Index] The language key 'watchlist_file_fi' exceeds the maximum size of 16. The name was truncated to 'watchlist_file_f'

Items longer than 16 characters in the name field for meta key items may be be truncated in RSA Security Analytics Core Devices and RSA NetWitness NextGen appliances.  Items longer than 16 characters in the name field for meta key items may alternatively cause the service to fail to load.

RSA NetWitness NextGen versions prior to 9.8 store this information in the /etc/netwitness/9.0 directory. The key item definitions can be found in the following files:

• index-decoder.xml
• index-concentrator.xml
• index-broker.xml
• index-investigator.xml (found in C:\ProgramData\NetWitness in Windows 7)

In RSA NetWitness NextGen version 9.8 and in all versions of RSA Security Analytics, the information is stored in the /etc/netwitness/ng directory. The key item definitions can be found in the following files:

• index-decoder.xml
• index-decoder-custom.xml
• index-concentrator.xml
• index-concentrator-custom.xml
• index-broker.xml
• index-broker-custom.xml

The following is an example of a key definition:  <key description="Ethernet Source" level="IndexValues" name="eth.src" valueMax="16384"/>

In order to resolve the issue, the name value in the key definition must be changed to be less than 16 characters in length.

The following commands may be used to examine the XML files in order to list the keys and their respective name lengths on RSA Security Analytics and RSA NetWitness NextGen 9.8 appliances: 

# grep -Po 'name=".*?(?=")' /etc/netwitness/ng/index-<service>-custom.xml | awk '{ print substr($0,7) " = " length(substr($0,7)) }'

# grep -Po 'name=".*?(?=")' /etc/netwitness/ng/index-<service>.xml | awk '{ print substr($0,7) " = " length(substr($0,7)) }'

The following command may be used to examine the XML files in order to list the keys and their respective name lengths on RSA NetWitness NextGen appliances with versions prior to 9.8:

# grep -Po 'name=".*?(?=")' /etc/netwitness/9.0/index-concentrator.xml | awk '{ print substr($0,7) " = " length(substr($0,7)) }'

If this does not solve your issue, please open a case with RSA Technical Support and reference this article so that we may better assist you.

The output of the commands above will look similar to the example below.

[root@NWAPPLIANCE1234 ng]# grep -Po 'name=".*?(?=")' /etc/netwitness/ng/index-concentrator.xml | awk '{ print substr($0,7) " = " length(substr($0,7)) }'
time = 4
service = 7
tcp.srcport = 11
tcp.dstport = 11
udp.srcport = 11
udp.dstport = 11