Symantec Management Platform (Notification Server)

Hello,

When navigating to the following location in SMP 7.1 SP2, there is a section that shows all the machines that are reporting to a specific site server.  The fields headings are (Name, Registered, Version, Tasks Run, IP Address).  If a site server is setup to service only machines on the subnet it was configured to service, why do machines from other subnets appear in that list under Task Services?  How can I be sure ONLY machines connected on that subnet will receive packages from that server?  Some of our packages are large and we don't want machines to download from any other subnet accept the one the machine is on.

For example. We see a bunch of means with the IP address 10.2.48.x (100 machines).  Then we see a machine with 10.86.16.x and another with 10.82.86.x.  Shouldn't these machines report to another Site Server?

Settings > Notification Server > Site Server Settings

• Expand Site Servers +
• Expand the specific site server you wish to view
• Expand Task Services

Thanks

go to settings\All settings and drill down to task server settings

you can choose the settings "connect to server with best bandwidth"

then run a "reset task server" task from the console on the machines that are pointing to the wrong task server

we have a policy that runs weekly to run the "reset task server" task which ensures few wrongly assigned task servers

HTH  C

AFAIK the site server that clients use for package downloads isn't tied to the one it will use for Tasks. And a client might use one package server for one package and another for another at a different time depending on network speeds it sees at the time.

Again AFAIK, Task Servers are purely to offload data processing from the NS, they make no difference to network traffic, the same amount of data is transferred to/from the client and NS wherever the Task Server is.

If there is no control over which site server a machine will access, what is the benefit in setting up Sites with assigned Subnets? 

Would it be acceptable to just place site servers in the field and not assign any subnets?

We want our images to be available at the different locations and to know that the when imaging a machine in a specific location it will be accessed from the site server in that local subnet, not a distant site server in a remote subnet

Imaging using the PECTAgent works slightly differently in that it will always try and pull the image from the Task Server it connects to, the package service is just used to distribute the Image Package around the Task Servers. For more information about using Task with imaging see:

"Best Practice: Managing Task Server Communications in 7.0 and 7.1"

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO48411

The thing that is causing concern is the following:

• We setup a Site A Site Server with Subnet 10.2.48.0 and Subnet 255.255.255.0.
• We setup a Site B Site Server with Subnet 10.2.24.0 and Subnet 255.255.255.0.

We see a large number of machines with 10.2.48.x reporting to Site B Site Server.  Shouldn't this machine be reporting to Site A ONLY?  Why is it even talking to Site B which is a completely different location?

Hi

You can manually assign clients to a site server to ensure they talk to the site server in their subnet

we currently don't do that as we have some site servers that only cover one subnet but we also have some site servers that have many subnets in their site and with 6000+ clients I really don't want to manually assign.

However we run the "reset task server" task as a policy weekly as stated previously and with the setting "connect to server with best bandwidth" enabled it works for us. Rarely see any issues with wrong task servers on clients.

we also cloned the task server settings policy and assigned it to only the NS with Max clients set to 100

and then excluded the NS from the original policy, this ensures the NS handles few clients, keeps it working nice and smooth

HTH C

For a Task Agent, do a reset of an individual one that you think is reporting wrongly and look at the log file if it continues to report to the wrong one.

Hello Carlsson,

I agree with you.  Manually assigning machines is not efficient.  We will not be doing that either.

Let me ask you a couple of questions:

We would expect all machines on the same subnet as the site server to automatically talk to it without any additonal steps.  Support indicated that we should just wait a few days for machines to report to any new sites/site servers that are deployed.  Our deployments are well over a couple of weeks and we still see large numbers of machines reporting to other subnet site servers.  We were able to click the "Reset Agent" button on one workstation and it appears to have re-registered with the correct site server.  We thought the agent would automatically take care of talking to the correct site server without this step.

• Does this indicate a problem or is this normal behavoir? 
• Why would machines talk to another site server other than one on the one on the same local subnet? 

Hi

I think that is default behaviour

Settings\All Settings\Notification server\task setttings\task agent settings

From my experience if you do not have it set to "Choose the Task Server to which the agent has the fastest connection" then clients seem to pick random task servers probably based on the other two options

"Choose the Task Server relative to the remaining capacity of each server"

"Choose the Task Server with the fewest computers currently connected"

also running the "Reset client task agent" as a weekly policy seems to work for us

HTH C

Thanks for the help.