BES affiliation groups

Customizations
1

(imported topic written by t4l0r91)

I am trying to understand the affiliation groups. Example: I have 100 relays and 50,000 clients. I want to separate the relays into 5 affiliation groups of 20 IP addresses each. I want 10,000 clients to only select from a pool of 20 relays.

I understand that I can install the client seek list in the __BESClient_Register_Affiliation_SeekList registry key contains the group names separated by semi colons.

I do not understand how the 5 affiliation groups are populated? I get that each relay will have a registry key _BESRelay_Register_Affiliation_AdvertisementList that tells the relay which affiliation group(s) it belongs to.

How does the client figure out which relays belong to which groups so that it doesn’t contact each of the relays? Where does the client get the populated list from? This is the concept that I am not clear about.

2

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey t4l0r,

Each time the master operator publishes any change, the console collects all the data about the relay and their affiliation groups and it publishes them to the relays.dat file. This file is distributed to the clients and so the clients always know about each relay and about which affiliation group.

It sounds like you have already been here:

http://support.bigfix.com/bes/install/besrelayaffiliation.html

Ben