The Server Groups tab lets you manage services in a multi-server PureMessage deployment from the Central Server Manager (CSM) server. You can also publish policy and related configuration settings from the CSM server to other PureMessage hosts. Server groups allow you to do the following:
Edge servers are not "aware" of the central server, or of their status as edge servers. Therefore, it is possible to manually configure an edge server and then accidentally overwrite that configuration by updating the edge server from the central server. One way to prevent this is by limiting user permissions on edge servers. See the "Managing the HTTPD (Manager) Service" section of the Administrator's Reference for information about configuring administrator and administrator group accounts.
Edge servers can only be accessed when the HTTPD (Manager) service is running.
Every PureMessage installation has a default "RPC User" account configured for the Manager service. This account has a limited set of privileges, sufficient for starting and stopping services and updating configuration files.
After a new installation, the Server Groups tab appears empty except for a message that there are "No hosts or groups configured" and a link to "Scan the network".
To scan your network to automatically populate the Network Status table, either click Scan the Network in the content pane or Find Hosts on the sidebar of the Server Groups tab. The Find Hosts function sends a broadcast UDP query to port 18080 of all hosts on the network. If the PureMessage Manager is running, it responds, and a remote host entry is added to the host where Find Hosts was run. The new host is displayed on the Network Status (default) page.
To stop or restart services running on remote hosts, you must manually configure authentication information for the remote host.