Hi - if you need to change the name (both the NETBIOS name and DNS name, if it matters) of a machine running BES Relay, are there any special procedures to follow first on the host? The machine is W2K SP4, we are moving it to another subnet and renaming it.
I know that I will have to update any clients that are overridden to use that relay, that’s a separate procedure, my question at the moment is only about what changes need to be done on the relay host itself.
I’ve done various searches on this forum and the bigfix support site but nothing useful came up.
Each time you propagate any action as the master operator, the BES Console builds a list of every BES Client that is reporting as a relay and uses either the DNS name of the computer or the relay override setting (there is a Task on the BES Support Fixlet site that will let you override the DNS name with a different name). This list is then sent to the BES Agents.
So… assuming the DNS name of the BES Relay is properly updated (you can see using the “DNS Name” property in the computers list) then you only need to propagate any action as the master operator and everything will take care of itself.
Ok thanks Ben - so the way I read this is that effectively this means I don’t have to do anything on the relay itself, I can just rename the relay, and the next action propagation that any operator makes in the course of normal operations will update the list properly.
I’m in San Francisco on the “BigFix” course as I type…
I’m looking to see what communication is DNS based other than relay selection. I’ve just been forwarded some e-mail messages from home showing increased DNS traffic from our file servers back to the main dns server and they are wondering if BigFix has any possible involvement. I currently have manual relay selection based on subnet which points to the relay at that location “main-2k-050.epsb.ca”, etc.
I’m wondering if I should switch to pointing at the relay by ip…
All BES Client activities (gathers, posts of new data, downloads, etc) will use the name of the BES Relay as specified (DNS or IP address), but the vast majority of DNS lookups are done at autoselection time because the BES Agent needs to know about all relays. If you have more than a couple hundred relays, you might want to switch them to IP addresses using the Task on the BES Support Fixlet site… This can significantly reduce DNS lookups from the BES Agent.
