Adding Deployment Target with same name overwrites existing one

[kkelchen]

Octopus Server Version Number: 4.1.1

Hello!

Steps to Reproduce

1. Have a Tentacle with a particular name that’s fully configured (installed on a machine to deploy to, recognized and healthy from the vantage point of the Octopus Server, etc.).
2. Install a new Tentacle on a separate machine using the same name as the existing Tentacle.
3. After setup is complete, the first Tentacle will seemingly no longer exist in the eyes of the Octopus Server; it seems to have been overwritten by the new Tentacle of the same name.

I would have expected the Octopus Server to validate that the Tentacle name is not a duplicate during Tentacle installation and prompt for a unique value. Right now it silently allows the Tentacle with the duplicate name to be created and the first Tentacle becomes toast, so you don’t even know you’re effectively performing a delete operation on existing infrastructure and screwing things up. It can be magnified further in that the default value for Tentacle names during installation is the computer’s machine name, and some cases such machines can have fairly generic names that would be duplicates.

We ran into this issue in production that now requires working with a client to reconfigure their Tentacle before we are able to deploy to them again. Reinstalling a Tentacle is even more effort when you’ve lost the Environments, Tenants, or other configuration on the Tentacle that needs to be correctly restored.

Our workaround is that before we install any new Tentacles we need to manually look in Octopus to see if there are any existing Deployment Targets of the same name, but there is room for error in doing this.

I tried searching for this as an existing issue and the best things I could find were two comments (this one and this one) in the same thread that were posted by Robert Wagner.

Still, thank you for all the hard work and for creating such a great product!

Kevin

[tom.williams]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for reaching out, sorry to hear you are having issues registering your Tentacles.
Are you registering the Tentacles using the Tentacle.exe register-with command? There is an option -f, --force that allows for overwriting of existing machines, the inclusion of this option would explain the behaviour you are seeing. If you aren’t using the -f parameter, would you be able to share the command that you running (excluding any private info such as the API key) so that we can attempt the reproduce it on our end.

I hope that help, please let me know if you have any further questions.

Kind Regards,
Tom W

[kkelchen]

Hi Tom!

We are just using the Tentacle installer for installing a Polling Tentacle. It is version 3.16.3, x64.

During Polling Tentacle installation you are to specify a “Machine name” as you can hopefully see in the included image:

If this machine name already exists for a Deployment Target in Octopus the existing Deployment Target will get overwritten during Tentacle installation.

Hope this helps!

Kevin

[tom.williams]

Hi Kevin,

Thank you for sending that through, I have reproduced it on my end and can confirm that this is something we are going to look into.
We have raised a bug here which you can track if you interested in following up on it.
We will most likely add an option to the UI to indicate whether you would like to override existing tentacles.

I hope this helps and hopefully we will have a fix for this issue in the near future.
Please let me know if there is anything else I can help with,

Kind Regards,
Tom W