[chef] remote Node concept?

[Patrick Debois < >]

Hi list,

I'm rather new to Chef usage. So please forgive for ignorant questions, 
remarks ;-)

While looking at the functionality in Chef, I'm wondering if there 
exists a way to manage nodes over ssh.
In the past I've written my own scripts (not recipes obviously) that can 
be either executed locally or remote (over ssh).

If I understand it correctly, in Chef currently every node has to be a 
chef-server or chef-client installed. What I'm looking for is a kind of 
agent-less approach, where recipes get applied over ssh. Hence the idea 
of a remote Node.

I understand that recipes can be written in ruby, so making them execute 
remote will be hard if no ruby is installed. Still for the script or 
commandline execution, file copying and so on, these can be executed 
over ssh (if they execute commandline equivalents) using plain shell 
commands. Recipes could be marked as remote if all commands can be 
executed remote or not.

Another side effect of this capability, is that any device that has ssh 
and a commandline API (such as vmware, xen, routers, switches, 
firewalls) can be integrated in Chef without them requiring ruby or 
anything else.  It would make the tool pass better security guys because 
it doesn't require any additional software on the devices.

My first thought would be to make chef-solo execute command over an ssh.

What do you guys think of this idea? Wrong assumptions? Worth 
investigating time in to integrate it in Chef? Or any other ways to 
tackle this?

Thanks for any feedback ,

Patrick