Matching Devices - Including OrgID

With our next release of Open-AudIT (likely 4.3.4) we are further refining how we match devices discovered to devices in the database.

This is an optional configuration option, enabled by setting discovery_use_org_id_match in the global configuration.

When you create a discovery you have an option to devices_assigned_to_org. This means that any devices discovered for this discovery will be assigned (have system.org_id set to) your chosen Organisation.

Previously we have ignored this in our match rules.

From this release onward, we will take this into account for devices for a certain defined subset of match rules. These rules are:

• match_dbus
• match_fqdn
• match_dns_fqdn
• match_hostname
• match_dns_hostname
• match_ip
• match_ip_no_data
• match_serial
• match_serial_type
• match_sysname

You might have noticed these match rules are for items that might not be globally unique. Some examples:

• DBus - if you clone a Linux virtual machine, unless you manually regenerate this (and in my experience, people do not) it will remain the same.
• FQDN - This should be globally unique, but I have seen instances where it is not.
• Hostname - Think of mail.domain1.com and mail.domain2.com - same hostname.
• IP - It is not uncommon to have an overlapping address space in a given Organisation. Not ideal, but not uncommon.
• Serial - It is very common for second tier motherboard manufacturers to not set this, to set it to all 0's or even all F's.
• Sysname - This is settable by users and so even though it should be globally unique, there is certainly no guarantee of this.

What does this actually mean to you?

If you don't normally set devices_assigned_to_org, then it will have no effect. We only check using the OrgID if it has been set in discovery (or manually in an audit script).

If you do normally set devices_assigned_to_org, then the OrgID will be used to further refine the match.

If you subsequently change the OrgID of a device after discovery then you will likely have a new device created the next time the discovery runs. In this instance, you should probably just unset devices_assigned_to_org before running subsequent discoveries. This is because (in this instance) you have told Open-AudIT "these devices from this discovery belong to Org X", but then changed the Org of the device. You have changed the stored devices information. In this case - there is no no longer a device belonging to Org X, so we create a new one.

If this change does not work for you, all is not lost. We have added a configuration item (set to n by default, so it will use not this new option out of the box) called discovery_use_org_id_match. If you change it to y then the OrgID assigned to the device by the discovery will be used in the relevant match rules.