The Group Manager component of the Sun Ray Authentication Manager daemon is responsible for recognizing servers as belonging to the same failover group. Failover group membership is dictated by a "group signature", which is like a password that is requested during the Sun Ray Software installation. The group signature is a key used to sign messages sent between servers in the group. This key must be configured to be identical on each server.

Server-discovery requests are the only unsigned network traffic accepted by the Group Manager. All other network traffic received by the Group Manager that fails a validation test against the group signature is discarded. So, the Group Manager maintains group status and connectivity information only on the basis of reports from members of its own failover group.

You can modify the group signature after installation by using the utgroupsig command. In order to put the new group signature into effect, you must coordinate the change on each server within the failover group followed by a warm restart of all servers in the group .