Registering Owner group field

[Joan10]

Hello all,

We are trying to set up our first Nivlheim server and we are interested in registring the owner or contact information of hosts. Seems that the field Owner group is the way to go, but can't find anywhere how it gets populated or how we can configure it. I found this issue #107 but I still can't realise how ownership gets determined. Could someone give me a hand?

Thanks,
Joan

[oyvindhagberg]

Hello Joan,

The code that determines the owner group for hosts is very company-specific for us, so we wanted to keep it outside of the Nivlheim codebase. We did this by having Nivlheim make a http call to (something external) for each host, supplying the hostname, and receiving back the name of the owner group, which then is stored in that field.

You configure the url in server.conf. Here's an example (this is how we do it):

HostOwnerPluginURL=http://127.0.0.1/owner.pl

Nivlheim makes a HTTP POST to that url, with the following parameters:
key = a temporary API key, if the plugin wants to make API calls back to Nivlheim
hostname = the hostname that Nivlheim wants to know the owner of
certfp = the certificate fingerprint of that host (useful if you want to make API calls back)

Nivlheim expects the plugin to answer with HTTP status 200 and one line of text, the name of the owner group.
Nivlheim will store that value in the "owner" field for that host.

Here's the code for the server side:
https://github.com/unioslo/nivlheim/blob/master/server/service/host_owner.go

Regards,
Øyvind Hagberg