I had a system recently where failover couldn't be built because for some reason it was using an unplugged NIC as the primary NIC. I was able to configure failover after disabling the unplugged NIC and restarting the DMA. The NIC was plugged in initially but was unplugged while the machine was running. However, on the backup DMA the NIC setup was the same but the NIC that was unplugged was never plugged in.
Using the powershell command "get-netipinterface", I saw that the adapters on both machines didn't have matching priorities. Is there some documentation on how to specifically enumerate the NICs that are to be used in failover system?
Hi Luis,
To prevent that DataMiner is using the wrong NIC for the wrong IP you can specify the order in the DataMiner.xml as indicated in the DataMiner Help through the NetworkAdapters tag.
We encountered a similar problem where the IP of one adapter was switched with the adapter IP of the other leading to the server being unreachable due to VLAN settings.
Note: Under the advanced settings you can get more detail on the configuration under Virtual IP addresses to see what Adapter is being used for what IP.
Hi Michiel and Wouter, thank you for the information. I’m aware of the NetworkAdapters tag and have used it plenty of times. It’s a great feature! The customer that asked me about this information wanted specific documentation, if there were any, but it doesn’t seem like there are. This was the specific request “During a recent Test DMA installation issues were encountered related to unused NICs interfering with the Failover setup. A couple of unused NICs including a WiFi adapter was interfering with Dataminer Failover configuration making it impossible to configure Failover. See TT 3833. It appears that Dataminer has certain requirements as to how Windows assigns NICs to IfNumbers or how it enumerates the NICs. We need clear documentation on these requirements.” I explained to them the usefulness of the NetworkAdapters tag in this situation but they still wanted some more technical information. Let me know if you such information exists or not.
Wouter, I our case we had the IP v4 metrics set up so the NICs were being enumerated as we wanted with External/Corp = 1st and Internal/Acquisition = 2nd but unplugged and this was confirmed with the order they showed up in ipconfg output. Problem appeared to be due to an additional NIC (WIFI) in the DMA that was not being used but for some reason this caused problems with DataMiner and Failover configuration. The DMA kept putting an IP address of 127.0.0.1 for IP address 1. In the end we had to disable ALL unused NICs in the DMA. What I am looking for is an installation procedure/documentation that outlines exactly how DM requires the NICs on the DMA be configured for everything to work. Thanks
Additional questions:
1) Can you change the settings on an existing in service DMA
2) I assume after changing the settings DataMiner will need to be restarted
3) What impact will changes to the settings on an existing Failover configuration.
Thanks
Hi Jeff,
1) Yes, you can change the settings on an existing in service DMA by changing the NetworkAdapters setting in the DataMiner.xml file. Note: It is always best to stop DataMiner, make the changes to the xml file and restart the DMA.
2) Indeed as mentioned above a restart is needed.
3) In case you have a Failover setup it will be tricky to make these changes. You will need to stop both agents, configure the correct order in the DataMiner.xml file and make sure it matches the configuration in the DMS.xml file before starting them up again. If the order is incorrect, an agent could try to add a virtual IP address to the wrong interface, likely causing the agent to become unreachable. Also make sure here that the DMS.xml on the main and backup agent have the same IP settings in the section.
As additional info:
DataMiner uses a Windows function to request the list of available network interfaces.
Before Windows Server 2016 / Windows 10, the order in which adapters were returned by this function could be controlled through the WIndows UI. Starting with Server 2016 / Windows 10, he order in which adapters are returned is determined by the IPv4 or IPv6 route metric.
The safest approach is indeed to specify a fixed order for the adapters in the NetworkAdapters tag.