[chef] Re: Advice sought on Chef-ifying heterogeneous mess of Unices

[Booker Bense < >]

On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 6:52 PM, Christopher DeMarco 
<
 >
 wrote:
> I run a smallish shop of about 50 Linux and OSX boxes, all of varying
> vintage.  All are one-offs, and all are SPOFs.  There are very few
> apps/configurations in common - MTA, SSH, some backup systems, etc.
>
> I tried Puppet ca. 2008, and ran into 2 problems, which I'd like to avoid
> with Chef:
>
> 1.  Where to start?  I began learning by putting my .emacs and .bashrc
> everywhere.  While that was cute, it quickly became more trouble than it was
> worth, because I didn't automate anything of high risk, value or volume.
>
> 2.  How do I get legacy systems into the fold?  I have every version of
> Ubuntu and OSX since 2007, and therefore my Ruby will be archaic.
>

You can't use the OS ruby dependably to run Chef. If there's an omnibus 
version
for your OS that's great, but building the Chef client and it's
dependencies from
source is reasonably straightforward. Build it in /opt/chef and follow
the omnibus file layout pattern.

The Chef server is a lot more complex and will be changing in the near
future. I would only
run that on a supported platform and definitely use "chef to install
chef-server". But given the
snowflake nature of your setup, you might be better off starting with
chef-solo.

Since it sounds like you have nothing now, anything in this direction
will be an improvement.

Just to put out an alternate perspective, I would start with something
simple ( like /etc/motd )
and deploy it as widely as possible. That will give you some hint of
the pitfalls involved. If you
focus on just one OS, you can get into some bad habits that will make
code reuse much harder.

It really depends on the time scale and goals. There's a lot to
running chef besides writing chef
cookbooks; you need to figure out a workflow and repository setup that
will work for your situation.

- Booker C. Bense