dc_config.txt file is missing or empty

DC Agent Troubleshooting | Web Protection Solutions | v8.5.x | 29-Apr-2022

If DC Agent does not create a dc_config.txt file, this indicates that it is either unable to see any domain controllers, or the service does not have read and write privileges to the web protection bin directory.

If the DC Agent Service has read and write permissions to the bin directory, the most typical reasons it cannot create the file, or the file is empty, are:

DC Agent is not joined to the specific domain.

DC Agent cannot locate the domain controllers when doing an nslookup on the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN).

If you are unable to resolve the issue preventing DC Agent from creating the file, it is possible to create the file manually (see Create the dc_config.txt file manually). When you do this, however, if the underlying problem is not resolved, DC Agent cannot detect changes to your network structure. You must maintain the list of domains and domain controllers in the dc_config.txt file manually.

Use DC Agent for domain discovery

Log on to the Forcepoint Security Manager and go to the Web > Settings > General > User Identification page.

Click the DC Agent instance hostname or IP address in the Transparent Identification Agents list.

Under Domain Discovery, make sure Enable automatic domain discovery is selected. If you are using v8.5, then select DC Agent as the service to use for domain discovery. With v8.5.3 and later, domain discovery will always be done by DC Agent.

DC Agent must run with domain or enterprise admin permissions to perform automatic domain discovery.

Click OK to cache the change, then click Save and Deploy.

After about 2 minutes, the dc_config.txt file should be created automatically.

Create the dc_config.txt file manually

Open a text editor on the DC Agent machine.

Use the following format to list each domain that DC Agent should poll, followed by its domain controllers, as shown below. The square brackets ([]) around the domain name are required.

[WEST_DOMAIN]
dcWEST1.forcepoint.com=on
dcWEST2.forcepoint.com=on
[EAST_DOMAIN]
dcEAST1.forcepoint.com=on
dcEAST2.forcepoint.com=on

Enter a carriage return after the last line in the new file.

If this hard return is not included (creating a blank line at the end of the file), the last entry in the file gets improperly truncated, and an error message like the following appears in the websense.log file:

WSDCagent : Error reading Config File: dc_config.txt Erroneous Entry: dcEAST2=o

Save the file in the web protection bin directory (C:\Program Files\Websense\Web Security\bin, by default) with the name dc_config.txt.

Use the Windows Services tool to restart the Websense DC Agent service.