[chef] Re: Re: Re: Omnibus Client installer open beta

["Eric G. Wolfe" < >]

I have 3 remaining RHEL 4 boxes under Chef management.  I should have 
that down to 1 remaining RHEL 4 box by end of year.  I will however, 
share my experience running it on RHEL4.

As far as I know RHEL 4 has never been a supported platform for Chef.  
Some of the problems you'll encounter will be the package provider 
defaulting to yum.  While the actual package manager is up2date, and 
there is no up2date package provider for Chef.  So if you do choose to 
use it on RHEL 4, then you'll need to add the EPEL repo for the 4.x 
release.  You'll need a yum package at the least.  Can't remember if I 
got a yum RHEL4 package from EPEL, or Dag Wieers' repo.  I just have an 
empty yum.conf on RHEL4, so that yum won't return an error code if Chef 
does happen to call it.  I do avoid managing packages on RHEL4.  
Instead, I manage resources like users, flat config files, and template.

The other hurdle you may encounter is getting a recent Ruby, and Gem 
binary, on RHEL4.  I believe our remaining RHEL4 systems had Chef 
installed by RVM (http://rvm.beginrescueend.com).  I can't say for 
certain if this was a manual process, or if I used my scripted 
installer.  You can find the source code for that scripted installer, 
here: https://github.com/atomic-penguin/chef-fat-installer.  It should 
work out of the box on RHEL4, but it may not.  However, you could modify 
it to run up2date commands, or at the least, derive a manual 
installation process from the code.  Using RVM to bootstrap Chef is 
probably frowned on, at least now that we have Omnibus.  If you want to 
use Chef to manage resources on RHEL4 there honestly are not a lot of 
well tested options to get Ruby and Gem on your RHEL4 system, in this case.

I hope that helps.  In summary, if you can get a Ruby and Gem supported 
by Chef on the RHEL4 box, installing by rubygems is the easiest route 
(http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installing+Chef+Client+on+Other+Operating+Systems). 


On 12/17/2011 11:05 AM, Burkholder, Peter wrote:
> Hi,
> On Dec 16, 2011, at 8:32 PM, Sascha Bates wrote:
>
> > I've used this on various version of Ubuntu and Red Hat (4 and 5) and I think 
> > it's awesome!  I truly appreciate the ease of use it brings to client 
> > installs.
> >
> > Sascha
> So, how do I move forward getting this to our RedHat EL4 boxes (since I can't 
> drop off the roof just yet).  I only see RHEL5/6 as supported.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Peter
> --
> Peter Burkholder | Sr. System Administrator (consultant)
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