[chef] Fixing some very annoying bugs in jetty and chef-server-webui

[Geoff Meakin < >]

Hi all,

If you've ever tried to install debian chef-server from apt, you'll know 
there are 2 very annoying bugs which prevent it all automatically working.

The first is it relies on the "jetty" package, which is configured to NOT 
START in the debian package itself (the jetty package not the chef package). 
Ridiculous.

This is how you may go about fixing that in your knife bootstrap bash/sh file:

# Fix poor .deb installation of jetty in preparation for chef-server 
dependency
apt-get -y -d install jetty                                         # 
Download only (do not install)
dpkg --unpack /var/cache/apt/archives/jetty*.deb                    # Unpack 
only 
perl -pi -e 's/NO_START=1/NO_START=0/' /etc/default/jetty.dpkg-new  # Fix 
jetty not starting
apt-get -y -f install                                               # Do the 
rest of jetty startup


The second is that chef-server-webui is a broken install. There is an 
unresolved bug about this - see known issues on this page : > 
https://github.com/CoreMedia/chef-bootstrap

However I've solved the reason why as follows:
strace -f /etc/init.d/chef-server-webui 2>&1 | less    reveals that "Password 
must be a minimum of 6 characters" is written to file descriptor /dev/null 
(why there is no log for the reason why it didnt start up)

By setting the passwords accordingly in /etc/chef/webui.rb to be more than 6 
characters rather than the default admin/webui, this fixed the problem of 
/etc/init.d/chef-server-webui not starting up and having to do a 
/usr/sbin/chef-server-webui start first.

This could easily be fixed in the deb by the chef moderators community 
otherwise I hope this helps anybody that is also frustrated by this


Regards
Geoff