Agent Discovery

Discovery is a process by which agents add themselves to one or more Situate domains. With discovery, you do not have to add assets manually in the UI.

Discovery saves a lot of time in trusted networks where large numbers of agents need to be added. However, it is not safe to use discovery with agents residing in untrusted networks because it makes it too easy for agents to be added maliciously.

Configuring the Server

Before discovery can be used, you must enable it. This discussed in the domain configuration section Agent Security.

Agent Discovery on UNIX / Linux

To setup discovery on UNIX / Linux, add the following line to Situate's config file (/etc/situate.conf by default).

DISCOVER="<domain>,<host>[,<port>]"

export DISCOVER

Where <domain> is the name of your Situate domain, <host> is the name of the server (We suggest you use the domain alias sit-<domain>) and an alternate port if Situate is not running on default ports.

For example, the domain "acme" would look like this:

DISCOVER="xona,sit-xona"

export DISCOVER

If you need to add the agent to more than one domain, you can use a semi-colon (";") to add additional domains to the discovery list.

By default, the asset created will have the same name as the host name. If a different asset needs to be created, set the DISCOVER_NAME variable to the desired asset name. The DISCOVER_DESCRIPTION can be used to populate the description field when it is created. Both settings go in /etc/situate.conf

Agent Discovery on Windows

To configure discovery on windows, set a REG_SZ registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Situate\SituateAgent\discover to <domain>,<host>[,<port>], where <domain> is the name of your Situate domain, <host> is the name of the server (We suggest you use the domain alias sit-<domain>) and <port> is the port (you only supply the port if the server runs on a non-default port)

By default, Situate will name the new asset the same as the computer's hostname. If you want to change this behavior, set a REG_SZ key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Situate\SituateAgent\discover_name to the desired asset name. You may also set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Situate\SituateAgent\discover_description to set the comment for the asset.