How to debug new host not registering with Rancher

Archive Rancher 1.x
1

Hi,

I’ve just set up a new Rancher server, and am attempting to connect a new host to it, using the “custom” option to add a host.

Traffic is routable between the host and Rancher itself, but for some reason, Rancher is never finding out about it.

The logs show a heap of stuff, but in all of that I’m not clear which bits I should be worrying about.

How would you suggest I go about debugging a host that won’t register?

(note, when I first tried this, I had local auth enabled. However, I disabled it, and still attempting to register a host refused to work)

2

try the following to see if the host can register and connect to the rancher server

ssh into the host you have registered in rancher. do a docker ps -a | grep rancher
you should see a container named rancher-agent running. If not: Try to re-run the host registration.( First remove anything that previously rancher agent did rm -rf /var/lib/rancher/state; docker rm -fv rancher-agent; docker rm -fv rancher-agent-state)

then do the following.

$ docker exec -it rancher-agent bash
$ env

Note the environment variables. Now run he following command to see if the agent can connect to Rancher server API (it will use the environment variable you saw before).

$ curl -i -u “${CATTLE_ACCESS_KEY}:${CATTLE_SECRET_KEY}” ${CATTLE_URL}

You should get a 200 OK from rancher server with proper JSON return. This means that the agent can authenticate and connect to Rancher server.

See also http://docs.rancher.com/rancher/latest/en/faqs/troubleshooting/

3

Thank you for your help! It led down a track that got me here which suggested it might be nginx in front of my Rancher server causing issues for websocket calls.

I somewhat blindly copied some extra config into my nginx configs (copied from here) and lo and behold, after restarting the nginx proxy, my host registered itself.

Thanks for your help!