Kafka QuickStart, advertised.host.name gives kafka.common.LeaderNotAvailableException

Question

I am able to get a simple one-node Kafka (kafka_2.11-0.8.2.1) working locally on one linux machine, but when I try to run a producer remotely I\'m getting some confusing err

Answer 1

Set advertised.host.name to a host name, not an IP address. The default is to return a FQDN using getCanonicalHostName(), but this is only best effort and falls back to an IP. See the java docs for getCanonicalHostName().

The trick is to get that host name to always resolve to the correct IP. For small environments I usually setup all of the hosts with all of their internal IPs in /etc/hosts. This way all machines know how to talk to each other over the internal network, by name. In fact, configure your Kafka clients by name now too, not by IP. If managing all the /etc/hosts files is a burden then setup an internal DNS server to centralize it, but internal DNS should return internal IPs. Either of these options should be less work than having IP addresses scattered throughout various configuration files on various machines.

Once everything is communicating by name all that's left is to configure external DNS with the external IPs and everything just works. This includes configuring Kafka clients with the server names, not IPs.