What is the actual Auto Registration process?

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Q: What is the actual Auto Registration process?

A: In practice, a green system operates in the following way. An un-configured poller will reach for a local copy of the host-config file, find none, and go to sleep for 10 minutes (configured in gdma_auto.conf as the Poller_Proc_Interval).  On waking up, when it again sees it still cannot find its config file, if it has auto-registration credentials, it will do the auto-registration thing; otherwise, it will fall back to the old auto-configure protocol. All the auto-registration thing does is to make a call to the server, and look at the results. If the results include a hostname, the poller stores the hostname in the gdma_override.conf file. At that moment, it still doesn't have a host config file in hand. On the next cycle, it should pull the externals file from the GroundWork server, save it locally, and start monitoring the client machine.

The spooler, in its own cycle time, eventually sees that the configuration files have changed, and re-reads them. Then it will see the forced hostname and adapt to it.

When an auto-registration request comes into the server, it first tries to look up in Monarch to see if the host is already registered. There is a special Perl package installed (foundation/scripts/AutoRegistration.pm) that implements a pass of possible host-attribute recoding before this lookup. If that lookup fails, a second possible recoding (presumably with different logic this time) and lookup is attempted. If both passes fail and the package has not concluded that the attributes are totally invalid, the host will be added to Monarch.

The second pass of recoding allows IP = hostname lookups based on specific addresses listed in the server config/register_agent.properties file, for cases where DNS just isn't operating right on the client and there's no way to fix that easily.

Auto-registered hosts will begin monitoring as soon as they receive their own host configuration file from the server. They will then start sending on the results of those checks to the GroundWork server. At this point, however, Nagios won't know of the existence of such hosts, and it will casually drop those results on the floor, probably with a notice to that effect in the nagios/var/nagios.log file. Results from such hosts will continue to be ignored until the administrator (or perhaps some automated process) runs a Commit operation.