title: Kafka Connect Distributed mode The group coordinator is not available
body: <p>I have been trying this for two weeks now, I am running Kafka cluster on separate machines than my connect nodes. I am unable to get connect running properly. I can read and write to kafka no issue. Zookeeper seems to be running fine.</p>
  
  <p>I launch connect:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ bin/connect-distributed connect-distributed.properties
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Connect keeps looping through this error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[2018-08-21 15:45:12,161] INFO [Worker clientId=c1, groupId=connect-cluster] Discovered group coordinator 172.25.1.2:9092 (id: 2147483645 rack: null) (org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.AbstractCoordinator:677)
  [2018-08-21 15:45:12,163] INFO [Worker clientId=c1, groupId=connect-cluster] (Re-)joining group (org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.AbstractCoordinator:509)
  [2018-08-21 15:45:12,165] INFO [Worker clientId=c1, groupId=connect-cluster] Group coordinator 172.25.1.2:9092 (id: 2147483645 rack: null) is unavailable or invalid, will attempt rediscovery (org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.AbstractCoordinator:729)
  [2018-08-21 15:45:12,266] INFO [Worker clientId=c1, groupId=connect-cluster] Discovered group coordinator 172.25.40.219:9092 (id: 2147483645 rack: null) (org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.AbstractCoordinator:677)
  [2018-08-21 15:45:12,267] INFO [Worker clientId=c1, groupId=connect-cluster] Group coordinator 172.25.1.2:9092 (id: 2147483645 rack: null) is unavailable or invalid, will attempt rediscovery (org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.internals.AbstractCoordinator:729)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Here is what my connect-distributed.properties looks like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>bootstrap.servers=172.25.1.2:9092,172.25.1.3:9092,172.25.1.4:9092
  group.id=connect-cluster
  
  key.converter=org.apache.kafka.connect.json.JsonConverter
  value.converter=org.apache.kafka.connect.json.JsonConverter
  key.converter.schemas.enable=false
  value.converter.schemas.enable=false
  
  offset.storage.topic=connect-offsets
  offset.storage.replication.factor=3
  offset.storage.partitions=3
  
  config.storage.topic=connect-configs
  config.storage.replication.factor=3
  
  status.storage.topic=connect-status
  status.storage.replication.factor=3
  status.storage.partitions=3
  
  offset.flush.interval.ms=10000
  
  rest.host.name=172.25.1.5
  rest.port=8083
  
  heartbeat.interval.ms=3000
  session.timeout.ms=30000
  security.protocol=PLAINTEXT
  client.id=c1
  
  plugin.path=/usr/share/java
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>__Consumer_offsets topic looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>/opt/kafka/bin/kafka-topics.sh --describe --zookeeper localhost:2181 --topic __consumer_offsets                                       
  Topic:__consumer_offsets        PartitionCount:50       ReplicationFactor:3     Configs:segment.bytes=104857600,cleanup.policy=compact,compression.type=producer
      Topic: __consumer_offsets       Partition: 0    Leader: 2       Replicas: 1,2,3 Isr: 3,2
      Topic: __consumer_offsets       Partition: 1    Leader: 2       Replicas: 1,2,3 Isr: 3,2
      Topic: __consumer_offsets       Partition: 2    Leader: 2       Replicas: 1,2,3 Isr: 3,2
      Topic: __consumer_offsets       Partition: 3    Leader: 1       Replicas: 1     Isr: 1
      Topic: __consumer_offsets       Partition: 4    Leader: 2       Replicas: 2     Isr: 2.... etc
  </code></pre>