[chef] Setting up HA applications

["Pitucha, Stanislaw Izaak" < >]

Hi all,
I'm trying to figure out if there's a good way of reliably setting up 
configuration for HA services. Specifically - how to provision accounts / 
passwords in that setup.

Let's say I'm setting up a master-master mysql setup. With one box, I'd just 
use my known users with randomly generated passwords and do the grants 
locally. Now with two servers, that's not possible really. If I generate a 
random password, I cannot synchronise it with the other node, or at least 
cannot do that using node attributes without a possibility of collisions.

So it looks like I'm left with options I don't like:
- create user from outside (would require remote login as a root)
- set up user creation only on a single node (what if I want to update the 
password and that node is down?)
- set the passwords beforehand in a data bag (would work, but can't we do 
better? I don't want to care about password generation)

Regards,
Stanisław Pitucha
Cloud Services 
Hewlett Packard