the onion problem... I keep pealing bits off, but still no answer....
I was trawling the autodeploy log again and found something. There were a couple of lines about a duplicate request:
2014-01-27 16:10:51,609 [6300]INFO:addhost:a2fd4cd36991edeb468bb5cd2996cb2e : host booted up at : 2014-01-27 16:05:41.224058+00:00
2014-01-27 16:10:51,611 [6300]INFO:addhost:a2fd4cd36991edeb468bb5cd2996cb2e : Checking for a duplicate addHost request
2014-01-27 16:10:51,611 [6300]INFO:addhost:a2fd4cd36991edeb468bb5cd2996cb2e : The request seems to be a duplicate request
2014-01-27 16:10:51,622 [6300]INFO:addhost:the addhost task has not yet finished for a2fd4cd36991edeb468bb5cd2996cb2e
So then on the KB trouble shooting page from VMware, I found that you can connect to the autodeploy server with a browser and see information about hosts that have been autodeployed... and so when I open that up, I can see that yes, my problem host is there twice. I think I changed network cards in it at some point, or am possibly using a different port so the two hosts entries have the same name but different mac addresses and GUIDs.
So, I am thinking that probably isn't good. Is it causing my problem? I don't know, but I guess I would prefer to get rid of this duplicate registration. I checked the autodeploy database for corruption using sqlite, reindexed it, the duplicate still exists.
Saying that, I guess I could change the IP address to see if that gets thing working again anyway... but I am just wondering if there is a way of deleting hosts that have registered with autodeploy?