Switch tentacle modes of already configured deployment targets

[Emil]

Hi

I have a requirement to reclaim ports because of firewall hardware limitations.

Most of our tentacles are installed and configures as listening tentacles using port redirection. My plan is to switch the existing listening tentacles to polling mode in order to reclaim the port. I have to apply this for a large number of existing listening tentacles.

I don’t see a documented way to switch from listening to polling mode - is this possible?

Alternatively, I guess I have to uninstall existing tentacle and reinstall it in polling mode, which is something I was trying to avoid… What’s the best way to do this - I prefer to script/automate the change as it might be used many times in the future for reclaiming ports from the listening tentacles…

Thanks for your help in advance!

Regards,
Emil

[Daniel_Fischer]

Hi Emil,

Thanks for getting in touch! I just did some testing on my VM. I set up a Polling Tentacle and ran the following lines to convert it to a Listening Tentacle.

cd C:\Program Files\Octopus Deploy\Tentacle
Tentacle.exe configure --instance "Tentacle" --home "C:\Octopus" --app "C:\Octopus\Applications" --port "10933" --console
Tentacle.exe configure --instance "Tentacle" --trust "YOUR_OCTOPUS_THUMBPRINT" --console

I set the --instance value to the name of the Tentacle instance and input my Octopus server thumbprint after --trust. You will need to re-register the target with the Octopus server and the service will need to be restarted after the commands are run to reconfigure it.

The following snippet is the template for the code you can run to register the Tentacle with the Octopus server.

"netsh" advfirewall firewall add rule "name=Octopus Deploy Tentacle" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=10933
Tentacle.exe register-with --instance "Tentacle" --server "http://YOUR_OCTOPUS" --apiKey="API-YOUR_API_KEY" --role "web-server" --environment "Staging" --comms-style TentaclePassive --console

It seems to have worked fine and Octopus is deploying correctly once the Tentacle is re-registered.

Try this out and on a target and let me know if it works for what you need.

We also have a documentation page on automating Tentacle installation which I got the above snippets from, it may provide you with some further ideas and information.

Looking forward to hearing how this goes.

Best regards,
Daniel