[chef] Re: Re: Iterating through parameters when a resource is retried

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Monday, January 14, 2013 at 9:38 AM, Brian Hatfield wrote:

I wanted to bump this thread because I realized a more succinct way to ask my question:

Is there a way to cleanly handle the failure of a resource or a set of resources such that I can then perform some 'graceful degradation' action? (IE; 'begin...rescue' in regular ruby parlance, but that does not apply here)

Thank you!

Brian

Explicit support for this sort of thing was added as a one-off feature for remote_file resources[0] (but only merged for 11.0). I haven't looked at apt_repository's code in a while, but if it uses remote_file internally, there would probably be a small amount of integration work to get the mirror list feature wired up.

There isn't a general way of handling this, however. There is a retry parameter for all resources, but this isn't exactly what you're looking for. In the general case, you'd need to write a LWRP to wrap the underlying resource and iterate through your parameter list.

-- 

Daniel DeLeo

0. http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-3375

 

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 4:36 PM, Brian Hatfield < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Given a resource like the following:

apt_repository "global-generic" do

    uri "SOMEURI"

    distribution "SOMEDISTRO"

    keyserver key_server

    key apt_key

    retries 2

end

it will retry if for example the keyserver is not reachable. For whatever reason, we are finding that large number of keyservers are not long-term reliable, or we are getting blocked, or something, but our keyserver requests time out.

What I would like to do is make keyserver be a list, and if the first item on the list fails, iterate to the second and so-on.

However, when I try this (ie, key_servers.pop), in practice it pops one item off the list and retries that item over and over rather than 'pop'ing a new item on each retry. I get that this is because of the way that convergence and such occurs, but is there any way for me to retry with different values?

Thank you!

Brian Hatfield