[chef] Re: Bring up the discussion for knife-ec2 --node-name-prefix option

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Oct 21, 2012, at 5:35 PM, Sascha Bates 
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 wrote:

> How are people working with these servers that have no useful labels?  I 
> really want to know.  We ssh all over the place in our infrastructure and 
> if I had to go out and look up a special snowflake ec2-blah-blah or IP 
> every time I wanted to get to a server, I'd probably take a baseball bat to 
> my infrastructure.

IMO, if you're manually ssh'ing around in a large infrastructure, you're 
doing it wrong.

If you've got a small infrastructure, and you can keep all the hostnames in 
your head at the same time, and you can manage your IP address space with 
simple /etc/hosts files, then manually ssh'ing around may be required on 
occasion and is probably okay.

However, if you've got a larger infrastructure, then you should have better 
tools to get the information you need and put it in a place where you can get 
to it, without you having to manually ssh around.  Those tools might end up 
having to use ssh to get the information, but that part of the process should 
be hidden from you.

> For example, we run a Jenkins setup with 20 slaves.  The slaves are rebuilt 
> often using openstack and chef.  I'm currently writing a knife plugin to 
> set up ssh aliases for nodes in a role that make it easy for us to do 
> things like 'ssh slave20' as we are constantly helping people figure out 
> stuff about their jobs on the slaves or diagnosing VM issues (I'd actually 
> really like to take a baseball bat to our Openstack infra).

With Jenkins, there are tools to copy workspaces from one job to another, to 
copy workspace data from one system to another, to archive artifacts, etc.... 
 You should be making use of those kinds of tools so that you never need to 
go out to a specific slave to find out what went wrong with a given job.

--
Brad Knowles 
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LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>