Servers Using Relays that are More Hops and Further Away Over Closer Ones

Usage and Config
1

Over the past week I have been dealing with almost all of our machines going to relays that are further away. In some cases it was because our network team made a change that made the closer relay more hops than a further one so we put in some firewall blocks to stop that, but in other cases I see many servers going to a relay that is further away in terms of hops and IP subnet and the only way I can get it to use the proper one is either by manually setting everything which I don’t want to do really, or adding in more firewall blocks.

I can’t seem to make an HCL ticket right now because when I try to select a product from the drop down list it says there is no match and since its required I can’t continue, so has anyone seen this before or know why this might be going on?

2

Usually occurs because the client cannot Ping the closer relay. Is ICMP getting blocked?

3

I’m able to ping the closer relay. When we put in a firewall block it switched over to the proper relay, but won’t choose it on its own.

4

I can put together some things to look at but on a call shortly. Check for Affiliation Lists on client & relay, and check if the relay is set to not be autoselectable

5

Ah so yeah before we put in the firewall blocks we were going to try using affiliation lists. I put a relay affiliation advertisement on two of the relays but only put the client affiliation setting on about 17 machines. Just curious but why would having a relay affiliation advertisement cause servers, that don’t have the client affiliation setting, to use the wrong relay?

6

Depends on what you out into the Advertisement List on the relay.

I believe if you include the * string as an advertisement list, it can be selected by any client; but leave out the “*” entry, and it can only be selected by clients with a matching AffiliationSeekList.

7

For the two relays I put:
_BESRelay_Register_Affiliation_AdvertisementList
and for Value I put “Southfield” in one and “Aurora” in the other.

For the 17 Windows 10 machines I put the client setting in I put:
_BESClient_Register_Affiliation_SeekList
and the value was the same “Southfield”. I didn’t try any clients in Aurora before we changed plans.

8

So once everything finished selecting, you should end up with the only the 17 clients on “Southfield”, and no clients on “Aurora”.

9

Often we’d do an entry like “Southfield;*” on both relay and client, to make Southfield clients prefer Southfield.if available but if Southfield is not available then pick the closest.

10

Ok so I did not use the ;* so do you think that was causing a problem somehow? In the case of our Aurora machines even though none had the client setting, the Aurora relay did have the relay affiliation advertisement setting but without the ;* at the end, and the clients were going to our Deerfield relay which is definitely more hops than the Aurora relay which in some cases wasn’t even 1 hop.

Thanks again for all your help and explanation Jason.

11

Yes I think that’s all there is to it, just remove the Affiliation AdvertisementList from the relay and clients should be able to find it