[chef] Re: Re: Re: search returns for nodes sometimes reduced or empty

[Zac Stevens < >]

Hi Dan,

On Wed, Jun 6, 2012 at 4:00 PM, Dan Adams 
<
 >
 wrote:
> Thanks for the response - no, I set a new, manually-set attribute (nothing
> from ohai) that contained an array of the nodes returned via searching on a
> combinatino of environment and role. Ie i search for all app servers in the
> staging environment, and get back an array of hashes containing the node
> information for 1-4 hosts. The problem is that if I have, say, 4 app servers
> that have that role assigned in that environment, sometimes search returns 4
> and sometimes 3, sometimes 2.

I may have been unclear in my question - sorry if below I repeat
something you already know.
When you are searching, what is your search query?  Are you searching
for "roles:yourrole" or something else?

> I am hoping that the fix suggested by Ian works, since he says it worked for
> him. However, given that I don't really *need* search as such - I don't care
> what nodes are currently reporting as having the role, just what hosts are
> *assigned* that role in their definitions file - is there another better way
> that I can access this information from recipes other than via search?

Each node has a run_list, which contains both recipes and roles.
Roles can provide more run_list items - including other roles, which
may add still more.  So, when chef-client runs, it looks at the
run_list and expands the items on it as far as it can.  This process
produces the "expanded run list", and chef-client puts these expanded
lists into the "roles" and "recipes" attributes.

You can see this by comparing the following:
 knife node show <yournode> -a run_list
 knife node show <yournode> -a roles
 knife node show <yournode> -a recipes

Say I have a role called "physical-server".  This search will only
find nodes that have role[physical-server] on their run_list, and have
successfully run and saved their state back to the server:

 knife search node "roles:physical-server"

On the other hand, this search will find all nodes with that item on
their run_list, whether they have had a successful run or not:

 knife search node "run_list:role\[physical-server\]"

I don't use "knife node from file", and can't readily confirm that
that empties data out of the node in the way you describe - if it
does, that's going to cause you problems if you're searching the
contents of a node's "roles".  I've tried "knife node edit", and that
appears to leave the "roles" list unchanged.


Zac