Summary

This article applies to FlexNet Manager Suite cloud and on-premises implementations 2019 R2 and later.

With FlexNet Manager Suite 2019 R2, new functionality has been added to FlexNet Beacon 14.0.x and later that can be invoked with the use of the SQL file attached to this article in order to reduce FlexNet Beacon engine’s DNS lookups so that there are limited reads outside a particular FlexNet Beacon’s assigned subnet. As background, FlexNet Beacon executes DNS read calls when a FlexNet inventory agent requests a policy file, and when a discovery rule runs.

There are two settings in the compliance database that control FlexNet Beacon engine’s DNS lookups:

• BBeaconScopeDiscoveryToBeaconSubnet—The default value is false, meaning the beacon will still go outside of its subnet to do the DNS query. This is the current behavior of FlexNet Manager Suite. 
• BBeaconDNSCacheRefreshTimeIntervalMinutes—The default is 1440 minutes (24 hours).  The value in this property controls the time span in minutes before it will consider the data stale and thus refresh the values in the DNS cache.

If you wish to use the default values shown above, you can skip the following instructions that allow you to set different values in order to take advantage of reducing Flexnet Beacon engine's DNS lookups.

The following steps need to be executed on the database server.

To reduce FlexNet Beacon engine's DNS lookups:

1. Ensure that you are using FlexNet Beacon 14.0.x or later. 
2. Download the BeaconPolicyUpdate.sql file included in the ATTACHMENTS section of this article.
3. Edit the BeaconPolicyUpdate.sql file:
   1. Set the @scopeToBeaconSubnet variable to 'True':
      set @scopeToBeaconSubnet = 'True'
   2. Define the time span in minutes when data should be considered stale and a refresh of the DNS cache should occur (or retain the default 1440 minutes / 24 hours): 
      set @cacheRefreshtime = 60
   3. Save changes to the BeaconPolicyUpdate.sql file.
4. Run the BeaconPolicyUpdate.sql file against the compliance database. This updates the database with your new values for the settings that control FlexNet Beacon engine’s DNS lookups.