Strange client relay selection behavior

Usage and Config Platform
1

Seeing some strange behavior for only 1 client in our environment. It is a fresh client install (couple of days ago) of 9.5.4 on Win2008 R2Sp1 with automatic relay selection using affiliation seeklist. It was able to check in and register fine with the primary root server but then it does a relay selection and fails over the DSA root server, even though the DSA root server has no advertisement list values and there are no other clients in our deployment are using this DSA root server in this way.

I looked at the Relays.dat on the client and it looks good. I’ve done a client uninstall/delete reg and Program Files folder and reinstalled, same issue.

Telling the client to run the Force Relay autoselection fixlet makes no difference. Any other ideas?

thanks

2

The DSA server is probably showing up in the Relays.dat and may be “closer” than the actual server

The following doc might help you http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21599085

3

Yes. the DSA (and primary for that matter) are showing up in the Relays.dat file, but they do not have an affiliation set and the relays.dat confirms that. So does that mean that the client cannot reach all other matching affiliations of our tier1/tier2 relays and the last resort is to use a Root server, and the DSA root server happens to be closer than the primary?

Just weird that I have 30k+ clients in this environment and only this 1 client has autoselected the DSA.

4

So the obvious client that would select the DSA secondary would be the client ON the DSA secondary. That isn’t the case is it?

5

correct, the client using the DSA Root server is not the client installed on that server. It is a different standalone server that’s only role is a BigFix Client.

6

If you enable the EMSG (debug) log on the client and have it do a relay select then it will show you the decision tree that is involved so that might help

7

thanks. that helped. I knew that for this one client, it had a seeklist of “;regional;tier1” (which is not common for our deployment), but I assumed that the missing of the first value in the seeklist would just be ignored and it would go on and use the “regional” value. But turns out it did use the “null” and searched for a relay with no advertisement list, which was the case for our DSA root server. So to prevent this from happening again, I’ve entered a unique value in the advertisement list of our DSA server that will not ever be in any of the client’s seeklist values. thanks again.

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 12:11:29 -0600 DebugMessage Beginning Relay Select
Mon, 19 Jun 2017 12:11:29 -0600 Relay Selection:  Setting control server 
Mon, 19 Jun 2017 12:11:29 -0600 Relay Selection:  For agent only.
Mon, 19 Jun 2017 12:11:29 -0600 Relay Selection:  Initializing automatic selection with affiliations ;regional;tier1
Mon, 19 Jun 2017 12:11:29 -0600 Relay Selection:  Seeking unaffiliated relay.