Let’s begin by saying the network configuration on my Windows 8 laptop is atypical for normal folks. I run with:
- Two wireless NICs
- A wired NIC (generally disabled)
- A (Hyper-V related) internal network
- A (Hyper-V related) public network
- A Network Bridge to tie one of my wireless connections together with the Hyper-V public network
Tableau Server 7 works remarkably well with this configuration. Regardless of whether my network interfaces were connected with something or not, it ran like a champ
After installing Tableau Server 8 Beta1, I noted that the server became a bit more dependent on what interfaces were connected and which were disabled.
Specifically, it seems like the VizQL process has at times had problems connecting to the Data Engine. More often than not if I had a problem, it would occur when I ran a report which utilized an extract. Tableau would attempt to render it, and then after a few seconds, a “DataSourceException” error would be thrown and Tableau would ask me if I wanted to reset the view.
This caused me a bit of frustration on a long plane ride home from the West Coast, but after I had access to the internet again I pulled up this beauty:
Configuring Tableau Server to Listen on a Specific IP Address
The section “Deny access to local host” is quite useful. You can use it to tell Tableau’s internal processes to communicate with each other on a specific IP address other than 127.0.0.1. I used the IP address associated with my Hyper-V internal network, which is always active and connected, no matter what.
I then spent about 25 minutes trying to “break” Tableau Server 8 with various combinations of network interfaces in a disabled / enabled / connected / disconnected state. I couldn’t. She’s happy.
Posting this information in case you’re a networking masochist with tons of connections like me and you run into this little wrinkle.
