High number of clients pointing to server as relay

Usage and Config Platform
1

(imported topic written by khouck)

We have over 800 (out of 10000) clients pointing to our BigFix server as their relay. All of these clients have relay selection set to Automatic. The server and all of the relays are the same number of hops from these clients (6).

Other than manually setting the relay selection, is there anyway to get these clients off of the server; and, to keep others from pointing to the server (unless the other relays are down).

Thanks,

Kevin

2

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey Kevin,

The simplest thing to do would be to put a Relay in the same subnet as the BigFix Server… Agents will always prefer a BigFix Relay over the BigFix Server during autoselection unless the server is closer than every relay…

Better yet, put relays closer to the agents… 6 hops usually means slow network somewhere along the way…

Ben

3

(imported comment written by khouck)

We’ll have to look at putting a relay on the same subnet. Due to the way our network is laid out, the 6 hops is as good as it will get.

Thanks for the input.

4

(imported comment written by Shlomi91)

Hey Ben, isn’t there a setting you can set on the BES Server to prevent it from being autoselected as relay? something like BesRelay_Autoselection_Autoselectablerelay = 0 or something like that?

5

(imported comment written by StacyLee)

There are different things you can do with advanced settings for the relay (with weighting, etc). The one that works best for me is designating the fail over relay setting and not advertisng that paticular relay.

http://support.bigfix.com/bes/misc/besconfigsettings.html

_BESClient_RelaySelect_FailoverRelay

6

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey Shlomi,

Yes… but… the BigFix Server is always a choice for BigFix Agents because they consider it a “last resort”… If you really wanted to, you could change your server DNS to report to a Relay and then no agents would ever report to your server, but that is mostly not necessary (you would need to change your host file on your consoles for them to work properly).

Stacy points out the failover relay, which is a good idea because the agents will try to go to the failover before they try the server, but if your server is closer than the other relays, then the agents will prefer the server.

Ben