[chef] chef servers crashing w/ kernel panics? this may help

[Wes Morgan < >]

My chef-controlled EC2 instances have been crashing pretty routinely, and I 
finally got a log of the kernel panic from one of them. It turns out to be 
this issue: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/999755

As you can see in the link, it's related to an interaction bug among Ruby 
1.9.3 (which is bundled w/ recent Omnibus installations), ohai, and fairly 
recent Linux kernels.

So if you're getting kernel panics on your chef-controlled Linux boxes, make 
sure your kernel is patched against this bug. For Ubuntu, that means 3.2.0 >= 
29.46 or 3.0.0 >= 24.40.

On EC2 I needed to do an apt-get dist-upgrade to pull down the "held back" 
kernel packages and then reboot. But now I'm running a patched kernel, so 
hopefully this problem will go away now.

I hope this helps someone else, as it was driving me a little bit nuts. Happy 
cooking!

Wes