When installing a node manager, it may be observed that the status of the node may not be as expected in the Nodes and Services view of the Spotfire administration web console.
Possible problems include:
1) The node manager does not show as untrusted immediately after a new installation of the node manager software and the service being started.
2) The node manager can be trusted, but it never comes online.
3) The node manager can be trusted and it comes online, but when adding a service to it, the service fails to start.
Most of these issues are caused by the network environment of the Spotfire cluster. Before beginning the installation of either the Spotfire server or node manager, the following steps should be taken.
1) Each machine in the cluster (node manager or spotfire server) should have a hostname set. These hostnames will later form the basis for the internal certificates used in server to node manager communication.
2) It's best to have a functioning DNS system where each machine has a DNS entry.
If DNS is not available, then the hosts file should be modified with entries of each machine
The hosts file on windows is located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
3) When installing the node manager software care should be taken when prompted for the supervisor hostname. This should be the same hostname of the Spotfire server as observed in the Nodes and Services view of the web administration console.
4) For the purposes of node services the following ports need to be open on the Spotfire Server, 9080 & 9443.
On the node manager it's 9080, 9443 and 9501
More details on ports can be found here
To troubleshoot connectivity:
1) Disable all firewalls. These can be restarted when the issue is resolved.
2) Check if ports are reachable from peer machines. This can be done via powershell as follows
Test-NetConnection -Port 9080 -ComputerName nodemanager.example.com
The above command could be run from a Spotfire server to test if port 9080 is reachable on a node manager.
The above steps will solve the vast majority of issues getting nodes to function correctly. Please contact Informatics Support if further troubleshooting is needed.