Is there a recommended process around decommissioning a relay? I’ve been digging through the official 9.5 documentation and can’t find anything that immediately jumps out. Some research online led to this document briefly discussing the relay uninstall process.
I’ve inherited a BigFix installation and want to make sure I’m not going to cripple the infrastructure by pulling some relays existing on [very] old hardware. Any pros, cons, or gotchas to be aware of?
How are you doing relay selection with your clients?
There is nothing about a relay that needs to be kept around. They are basically disposable, with some very small considerations:
One exception might be that if you have a top level relay with a very large cache, it is sometimes nice to keep that cache around to help prevent downloads referenced in old content from no longer working, which may or may not be an issue for you.
The one thing you might want to do is to point the DNS name of the old relay to a new / existing relay. This shouldn’t be necessary, but if you have clients set up to manually select this old relay, then they may have issues having it being taken away. The other issue is that clients that do automatic relay selection may not know about all other relays for some reason, though this shouldn’t be an issue either.
How are you doing relay selection with your clients?
That will be part of this project, as I don’t know if there are any manual relay assignments in the system (to say the least of this particular relay).
Thanks for the DNS tip!
That is something you can look at with bigfix itself.
It also matters if the relay you are getting rid of is used by other relays. You should pay close attention to relays higher up the chain, but a relay that has no other relays connecting to it is much easier to get rid of without any additional considerations.
If you do the DNS thing, then you don’t have to worry about much, you just need to consider what relay will get the DNS pointer from the old relay. (for instance, if you point the DNS at an existing relay, and that relay uses that old relay as it’s parent, you’ll create a problem)