Force a Member to Become Primary in mongodb I looked into answers but nothing works for me in mongo 2.6.11 cluster 'nms' (members nms01m and nms02) below. I want my current secondary nms01m to become primary, and now nms02 is primary instead of nms02 (after nms01m failure last night). I tried stopping nsm02, restarting nms01m , changing priority, rs.reconfig(cfg, {force : true}) but nothing helps. It is always a struggle for me

nms:SECONDARY&gt; rs.conf()
{
        "_id" : "nms",
        "version" : 193970,
        "members" : [
                {
                        "_id" : 0,
                        "host" : "nms02:27017",
                        "priority" : 2
                },
                {
                        "_id" : 1,
                        "host" : "nms01m:27017"
                }
        ]
}
The reason nms02 becomes Primary when it joins the replicaset is due to having the higher priority setting.
According to the documentation:

Specify higher values to make a member more eligible to become primary, and lower values to make the member less eligible.
snip
A priority of 0 makes it impossible for a member to become primary.