[chef] Re: chef-solo and different server configs

[Jesse Robbins < >]

Out of curiosity, why use solo for this rather than hosted chef or 
chef-server?  I want to better understand your use cases.  (It seems like you 
may be doing a lot of work to do things that Chef exists to do and does well.)

-Jesse  




On Nov 19, 2011, at 8:58 AM, Hector Castro wrote:

> Not using CloudInit yet.  Currently deploying to an internal VMware setup 
> with standard 11.10 server images.  My preseed file:
> 
>       https://gist.github.com/1377459
> 
> In my setup all of the nodes actually serve the same purpose.  I wrote a 
> little Capistrano task to make the remote chef-solo runs a little more 
> automated.  It handles synchronizing the repository and executing Chef.
> 
> --
> Hector
> 
> On Nov 19, 2011, at 11:45 AM, S Ahmed wrote:
> 
>> With ubuntu, are you using cloudinit to preseed?
>> 
>> But with this setup, you have to run a different chef-solo command for 
>> each node type correct?
>> 
>> I guess to automate this a little further, you could have some sort of 
>> lookup system (maybe the hostname?) and look for a pattern, like if you 
>> hosts are prefixed with 'db' then it is a database node type or 'www' for 
>> a front end server.
>> 
>> On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 11:40 AM, Hector Castro 
>> <
 >
>>  wrote:
>> I'd be interested to see other people's approaches to this as well.  Right 
>> now I have chef-solo 2-4 server setup as well.
>> 
>> First, I install Chef via APT at OS install time with preseeding.  On 
>> Ubuntu/Debian Chef looks for cookbooks and roles in /var/cache/chef by 
>> default.
>> 
>> I have a Git repository housing everything that eventually gets sync'd to 
>> /var/cache/chef.  In config/ of that repository, I have one JSON file for 
>> each node.  In roles/ I have all of the shared role JSON files.  Cookbooks 
>> live in cookbooks/ and site-cookbooks/.
>> 
>> --
>> Hector
>> 
>> On Nov 18, 2011, at 4:14 PM, S Ahmed wrote:
>> 
>>> I'm planning on setting things up with the below setup.  This is for a 
>>> 2-4 server setup, looking for guidance/best practises for a chef-solo 
>>> repo.
>>> 
>>> When using chef-solo with a setup like:
>>> 
>>> /var/chef-solo/
>>> /var/chef-solo/cookbooks
>>> 
>>> If I have web servers, a db server, etc. to configure, I guess it is just 
>>> a matter of having the necessary recipies in the cookbook and then 
>>> creating a seperate .json file like web1.json and db1.json correct?
>>> 
>>> I'll save this in a git repo, so that if I need to update anything I can 
>>> then run a command than will update the repo's of all my servers, and 
>>> then run the chef-solo command.
>>> 
>>> Running chef with:
>>> 
>>> chef-solo -c ~/solo.rb -j ~/web1.json
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>