[chef] Re: chef, CentOS/RedHat, and rubygem-rest-client updates

[Paul Choi < >]

We use Chef with CentOS 5 at Plaxo. CentOS 4 also, although the init
script is a bit broken but it was a minor fix.

I agree that the packages are heavily Ubuntu-oriented. But Plaxo had its
own way of doing things, so I had to roll out my own cookbooks anyhow.
(That's why it's probably not worth sharing with the community, because
they're not really generically applicable).

I'm using 0.9.14 and it's been working out fine. I started with EPEL+ELFF
RPMs, and then I started building my own rubygems-chef RPMs as needed.
You'd also want to upgrade CouchDB, because the EPEL's CouchDB is 0.11.2,
and it's somewhat unstable. I used EPEL's SRPM as the basis for 1.0.2, and
it's been running fine since then.

I rely on my own shell script to bootstrap. We have physical servers and
VMWare Vms, and there's no nice way to do this via knife at this point.
You can install Chef and assign a run_list to the host with kickstart's
post script, but I find that you'd have to be pretty disciplined about
pre-assigning proper hostname and IP in DHCP.

-Paul

On 3/25/11 5:07 AM, "Michael Stillwell" 
<
 >
 wrote:

>What's the status of chef on CentOS/RedHat?  We've currently installed
>chef as described at
>
>http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+RHEL+and+CentOS+5+wit
>h+RPMs
>
>but I get the feeling that chef isn't very well supported on
>CentOS/RedHat.  For example, the latest RPM packaged version is 0.9.8,
>which is quite old, and isn't packaged by Opscode anyway.  (Unlike the
>Debian/Ubuntu packages.)  One of its dependencies is
>rubygem-rest-client (from EPEL), and this was updated to version 1.6.1
>in the last day or so, which breaks chef-client 0.9.8:
>
># chef-client
>/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:827:in
>`report_activate_error': RubyGem version error: rest-client(1.6.1 not
>>= 1.0.4, <= 1.5.1) (Gem::LoadError)
>        from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:261:in `activate'
>        from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:296:in `activate'
>        from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:295:in `each'
>        from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:295:in `activate'
>        from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:68:in `gem'
>        from /usr/bin/chef-client:18
>
>Will chef + CentOS be a viable combination in the future, or should I
>look to moving to a different distribution?  (Or figure out how to
>install/package chef myself, which might be about as much work...)
>
>
>
>
>
>Cheers,
>Michael
>
>-- 
>http://beebo.org