Bes relay distance property

Usage and Config Platform
1

(imported topic written by hdwivedi)

Hi,

All the relay in my bigfix setup show <n/a> under “Distance to BES relay” property, all the relay have ver 6.0.12. doing tracert i can see the relay machine can reach the bes server in 3-5 hops, but it does not show the distance in bes.

All the clients pointing to the respecitve relay show some numerical value under distance property but none of the relays do this.

  • In version 5.1.9 relays used to show the distance

someone please suggest the solution

2

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

hmmm

i see the same behaviour on some of my clients .

It looks like that this clients talk directly to the BES Server without a relay.

3

(imported comment written by wnolan91)

I have seen simular but only when the machines have “Failed over to the Main Relay” or to the FailOver Relay. This is useful in showing which machines are not able to find other Relays because of DNS Search issues, or in one case we had a relay set a DNS name that is none existent… for example… machine name ‘X’ had a DNS Value of X.yahoo.com rather then x.google.com… So by setting the _BESClient_Relay_NameOverride on the Relay that was set to X.yahoo.com to either the IP address which is useful for DMZ servers, or the x.google.com where machines could find it… the problem solved itself. I like the “n/a” as it’s a good indicator of what machines might be using the wrong DNS Server, or are being restricted to connecting to Relays, etc.

4

(imported comment written by jessewk)

Here’s the definition of the ‘Distance to BES Relay’ property. Note, there is an identically named property in the analysis ‘BES Relay Status’ in the BES Support site that is slightly different, but effectively the same:

if exists selected server then if upper bound of distance of selected server = 255 then error “unknown” else upper bound of distance of selected server else error “n/a”

So you can see the clients will report ‘n/a’ when the are unable to select a relay.

wnolan has correctly listed a number of reasons this could happen.

5

(imported comment written by hdwivedi)

This problem is only with Relays , clients pointing to the relays are showing correct values

  • all the relays have been set to override DNS name to IP

-relays are able to resolve the DNS name of the server, used ‘nslookup’ also ‘ping’ the server using DNS name