Deleting Duplicate Hosts In Satellite or Spacewalk

Sometimes when you register hosts to Satellite or Spacewalk you end up with duplicate hosts being registered.   The old one that will no longer check in and just be an orphan and a new one which will check in and get updates and packages.   I saw this behavior a lot in environments where people were using Vagrant and/or Openstack where they would continuously launch the same host with the same hostname and register it to Satellite. 

The script  below can be used to clean out those duplicate hosts and can be setup to run from cron daily.   The script assumes you run this as the root user and have configured root to run spacecmd without specifying username and password at the command line.  This was tested with Satellite 5.6.

#!/usr/bin/perl
### Delete duplicate hosts in Satellite or Spacewalk via Spacecmd ###
@duphosts = `spacecmd -q system_list | uniq -d`;
foreach $system (@duphosts) {
        chomp($system);
        $spacecmd = `spacecmd system_details $system 2>&1 |grep $system |grep =|sed 's/^.*=/=/'`;
        $spacecmd =~ s/\s+//g;
        $spacecmd =~ s/=//g;
        @ids = split(/\,/,$spacecmd);
        $count=0;
        foreach $ids (@ids) {
                chomp($ids);
                $count++;
                if ($count > $#ids) {
                        print "Duplicates removed for system: $system\n";
                        last;
                }
                $cmd = `spacecmd -y system_delete $ids`;
                print "$cmd\n";
                sleep (2);
        }
        print "Cleanup of $system complete...\n";
}
print "Cleanup of Satellite complete!\n";