[chef] Chef Queries

[Ravi < >]

Hi,

I am quite new to Chef and was exploring various features (ofcourse on a test
install which did following the helpful install guides).

1) Reporting end state of Nodes - Is there a way i can get the end state of
Nodes with respect to the run-list which has been applied to the Nodes ?
Basically looking for Audit/compliance kind of capability. 

2) With respect to cookbooks, is there a way i can copy a file from the chef
server repository to the nodes as a part of run-list (for .e.g install xyz.msi
on node x will require the xyz.msi to be first copied on to the Node and then
installed. 

3) Can i group the nodes by customer ? I understand that we can create roles
for grouping nodes with similar services. But in case for a customer solution
(presuming these nodes are running a customer specific app etc.) i would like
to patch only these nodes, is it possible ? 

4) Traditionally in Windows, most packages require multiple reboots. So for
e.g. in my run-list, i have a cookbook A which requires 2 reboots to complete
an install and a second cookbook B which has a dependency on cookbook A to be
processed. So, does chef agent has the capability to detect the point till
where the run-list was executed and then process the remaining run-list after
the reboots ? 

5) Any native uninstall capabilities  for packages deployed using Chef ? So 
can
i uninstall a package (which has earlier been deployed using Chef) using a
standard method or does it require a separate cookbook which has uninstall
receipes ? 

6) Another audit point is that can i see a complete history of changes which
has been done to the system using Chef (for e.g. all the run-lists which have
been applied till date with date/time wise details)

7) Can Chef report run-list failures (per cookbook per Node) ? 

8) Can i perform a flexible scheduling of packages ? So within a run-list, i
want x number of packages to be deployed at time A and the remaining y to be
deployed during time B ? 

Apologies for the long list but these are my initial queries after playing
around with Chef for a while.

Thanks,
Ravi