NetMaster Web Portal and Round Robin DSN

Products

• NetMaster Network Management for TCP/IP

Issue/Introduction

Planned to use NetMaster Web Portal by connecting more than one API Service.

Defined Round Robin DNS to the NetMaster API Services regions. There are 2 different APIs servers and ports behind a single DNS name. This configuration works fine when executing APIs directly.

When trying to configure NetMaster Web Portal to use the API Service regions via round robin DSN, the access to one of the regions gets "Failed to connect to Netmaster!" error:

Environment

NetMaster API Services and NetMaster Web Portal using round-robin DSN configuration

Resolution

The solution is to use a dedicated IP for each system. 

Round Robin DNS works if each system has content hosted on redundant servers, however that is not the case with the NetMaster API. Each NetMaster region feeding data to the API service has information specific to it that is not redundant across regions, for example smart trace definitions. In addition, for every Web Portal defined to a region, each connection must be serviced by the same API service, thus if the round robin changes the IP address, the connection will fail.

If you  have dedicated IP addresses for each system, the solution would be to use those dedicated IP's rather than the rotating ones coming from DNS. 

You could specify the static IP (or hostname) corresponding to the system in your API yaml file, and update the web portal yaml to reflect that.