[chef] Re: Chef Queries

[Ranjib Dey < >]

On Fri, Nov 11, 2011 at 10:30 PM, Ravi < "> > wrote:

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.

yeah, chef report and exception handler are pretty neat. There are already nagios, email report handlers available, you can try out them.

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.

although its not a file server , you can serve file from chef server using the cookbook_file resource type, you may consider pushing larger files to some ftp/http server and fetch them via http request resource.

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 ?

you can use tags to do this. and filter nodes based on tags

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 ?

standard package resource can accept action :remove , which will un install the package

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)

use report handler to achieve this.

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

yes via exception handler, also optionally you can continue the chef run even if  certain resources failed to converge,

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 ?

one of chef's core principle is be reasonable and chef try not to act too smart. Hence complex decision makings are explicitly modelled. chef being pure ruby makes it fairly straight forward .

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

Thanks,
Ravi