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 Constrained Package Server not finding local Unconstrained Server after timeout

deemacgee's profile image
deemacgee posted Mar 22, 2021 07:44 PM
Hi all,

Another day, another strange issue.

We have a site with terrible bandwidth which experienced a server crash, wiping out the local package server completely.
Once the hardware was repaired and brought back online, we had to rebuild the onsite package server and start resyncing packages again.

To speed this along, we shipped a fully-synced package server (in the form of a NUC device) directly to the location and enabled constraint on the local, rebuilt device. About 30 minutes after the NUC came online at site, the rebuilt server began to pull packages from it - exactly as planned.

Not long after that, someone pulled the power cable from the NUC and it went offline for the weekend. Come Monday, the rebuilt package server had given up on syncing from the NUC and was now syncing packages directly from the main Altiris server, which is exactly the situation we wanted to avoid.

However, nothing we do seems to inform the rebuilt server that the NUC is back online, and it insists on pulling packages directly from the Altiris server instead of the device right next to it. When I navigate to the package sources screen, the only paths listed are those on the Altiris server itself. The rebuilt server is still marked as constrained and the NUC still has the full package library, but all packages are still being requested from the main Altiris server.

Is this by design? If not, is it fixable? I've considered uninstalling/reinstalling the Altiris Agent on the rebuilt server to see if that resets the sources, but I'd prefer to leave that as a last resort. I understand there's a ~4 hour timeout before constrained servers direct package replication requests to offsite machines, but I'd have assumed this would stop once a local non-constrained server was available again.

Any help would be grand.

Cheers