NServiceBus Distributor clustering configuration

Question

Pardon me for posting here instead of serverfault, but NServiceBus seems like the kind of thing that really only developers understand.

The problem is that we have a new app that uses NServiceBus and we are eager to show off the new bells and whistles of our service yet we cant seem to get the thing running on our cluster. My question is rather simple, when the distributor is running on the cluster instance should all 4 queues be put in the config without an MSMQ server name, thus defaulting to the local machine name? We have the cluster instance configured to use its self rather than the physical host for the machine name, but the service wont start. I know the error queue can be remote, but what other queues can/should be remote and what should not?

I have seen this write up on NServiceBus clustering and its great, but it says nothing about the requirements of the distributor.

Thanks a ton!!

Answer 1

All four queues in the Distributor's config (DataInputQueue, ControlInputQueue, ErrorQueue, and StorageQueue) should NOT have an @ServerName at the end. Thus, they will all default to the "local" machine name, which because it is clustered and you checked the "Use Network Name for computer name" box, will become the name of the cluster.

I wrote the article you mentioned - I will update it to be more clear on this and include a sample Distributor configuration snippet.