Customer_Error when using the Virtual IP for FNMS agent.

[longdinh]

Hi Flexera community

We are facing a problem with customer with the upload inventory from the FNMS agent. We have 3 Beacons in customer environment and from some End Devices they need to use VIP (alias) to connect to these Beacons. They cannot connect directly to the Beacon because they are using VIP to make connection secure.

The problem here is that from the Download URL we can specify the VIP and FNMS Agent will be able to retrieve the Policy using VIP. However, when the policy is updated it can only know the Beacon from their name (not the VIP). Therefore, the FNMS agent is failing to upload the inventory file and it is broken.

The important thing here is that in the Beacon configuration file, we need to keep the Beacon name so if the device is within the same region as Beacon, they can use that Beacon without reaching to VIP. Because of that, it causes an issue with devices connecting via VIP.

Do you have any ideas on how we fix this or approach this? It affects large amount of FNMS agents in customer environment. Thank you.

[durgeshsingh]

Virtual IP is bind with Beacon alias name ?

Can you confirm  it.

[longdinh]

Hi Durgeshsing, yes Virtual IP is bind with Beacon alias name - we can imagine that the Beacon will have 2 identities - one will be used for a set of devices and another will be used for the rest.

[jevans]

Hi Long, thanks for reaching out on the Community!

I'm not sure of the best way to maintain that accessibility of one Beacon via two names.
If you wanted a Beacon to be accessible via a different networkName to it's fully qualified domain name, I might suggest the following knowledge-base article:

https://community.flexera.com/t5/FlexNet-Manager-Knowledge-Base/How-to-configure-the-beacon-to-use-a-different-name-or-alias/ta-p/2064

Perhaps deploying a different Beacon, then using Inventory Group settings to ensure your VIP Agents could only report to that device?

Kind regards and thanks,

Jack

Flexera Support

[mcavanagh]

Hi Long, 

There is a really botched way of doing this, Within this blog post https://community.flexera.com/t5/FlexNet-Manager-Blog/Data-Flow-Considerations/ba-p/195968

you can see Dummy Beacon Records, this is where you create an entry within the beacons with the connector strings that you want to setup. The main issue with this and why we don't really recommend it, this beacon will show within the beacons page and will never connect, this can also have problems with vCenter scanning not completing, along with a lot of other issues. 

[longdinh]

Hi Mcavanagh,

Thank you for your recommendation, how do we create a dummy records for the Beacon - it looks like this is the solution for the issue, even though it would never connect in the Beacon page. The most important thing is that we want all FNMS agents to connect to the system. Thank you.

[ChrisG]

You could arrange to manually configure a set of registry entries like the following on devices that may need to use the specialized details (replace the IP address "1.2.3.4" where it appears below with the actual VIP you want to use):

• HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\ManageSoft Corp\ManageSoft\Common\
  • DownloadSettings\Beacon by VIP\
    • Protocol = http
    • Host = 1.2.3.4
    • Port = 80
    • Directory = ManageSoftDL
  • UploadSettings\Beacon by VIP\
    • Protocol = http
    • Host = 1.2.3.4
    • Port = 80
    • Directory = ManageSoftRL

These details will then get considered by the agent for downloads and uploads alongside any other beacon details that are delivered through policy.

[adrian_ritz1]

Hello,

I also had several customer who wanted to communicate either on port 80 or on port 443, I told them, this is not possible, and that's why we have 2 beacon servers , one with port 80 and one with port 443, in this way every thing is standard, and I let the agent decide on which port to communicated, the reason for port 80 what that inside the datacenter the agent should use port 80.

[longdinh]

Thank you Chris,

However, the problem here is that the agent has been deployed for the devices and we don't want to use GPO to push the registry key to the devices. Do we have any other methods for updating the registry key for the FNMS agents in the end devices? Thank you.

[ChrisG]

The FNMS system is able to send around and configure details for known beacons as part of the "failover settings" package that get distributed, but it doesn't have any capability built in to configure arbitrary registry settings like discussed above that aren't based on a configured beacon once the agent has been deployed. If you wanted to go down the path of configuring custom download and upload settings like this you would have to find some way to do that using some mechanism the organization has in place for deploying general registry changes to Windows devices.

[mfeinman]

@ChrisG - does this manual entry get overwritten if a policy change contains an updated Beacon list?

--Mark 

[ChrisG]

Yes, a manually created registry entry will get overwritten if the policy contains different details. But manually created entries wouldn't normally be deleted. So if want your entries to stick, avoid using a registry key path that will match what gets set through the policy.

[mfranz]

I have a customer with a no-DNS zone (security reasons). We added a "fake" entry to the Beacon table to effectively have name and IP for the same beacon available to all agents.