mom: what does maintenance mode speak to? (packet details)

i'm not sure why i never bothered to look at this before. i guess it piqued my interest because a coworker asked me what it needed to communicate with... the server or the agent? well, i fired up a packet sniffer and found this...

{MSRPC:456, TCP:455, IPv4:454} 192.168.1.85 192.168.1.35 MSRPC 
MSRPC: c/o Response: unknown 
{MSRPC:456, TCP:455, IPv4:454} 192.168.1.35 192.168.1.85 MSRPC 
MSRPC: c/o Request: unknown 
{MSRPC:456, TCP:455, IPv4:454} 192.168.1.85 192.168.1.35 MSRPC 
MSRPC: c/o Response: unknown

there's really nothing relevant in the trace to look at. just the fact that the rpc traffic from where maintenance mode ran only goes to the mom agent. so, i guess it is true that maintenance mode uses the agent to communicate to the mom server.

this is kind of odd, i think... mostly because you can't use the command-line tool to set the machines in maintenance that are already down.  anyway, make sure the agent can communicate to the server and wherever you're running it from can communicate to the agent.

(you -> agent -> mom server)