[chef] chef-solo server deploy with many services

[Albert Vonpupp < >]

Hello,

I'm totally newbie to chef and this is my first post on the list. I need to deploy several servers with the following requirements:

* Servers are mostly identical only some variables are changed. Further details on [1].

* Servers are geographically dispersed.
* I won't do any local administration on those servers on a daily basis, just eventually if local admins have problems.
* There might be some connections issues so decentralization is a must

* The solution "should" run in all major linux distros available.

* I need to ensure the installation and configuration of the following services: DHCP server, DNS server (Bind), NTP server, NFS server, Samba server and LDAP server, as other stuff like users, groups and folders creation.

For all of the above reasons I thought using chef-solo for deploy instead of regular chef.

This is the workflow that I thought.

- I prepare and maintain a git repository (or/and deb / rpm package)

- The local admin clones (or install the package) and executes the main program which invokes chef-solo

I've been reading and researching for a module to configure a ISC DHCP server. I tried the dhcp cookbook http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks/dhcp which seems to be broken. (I won't post the log because is not the focus of this email).

I thought that perhaps using my files as templates and just changing the variable values perhaps would be easier. I have a repository with the config files here: https://github.com/ccinfra/conf/tree/master/srv/etc

Is this a reasonable approach for the project description? What would you experts recommend? Using my conf files or using cookbooks, if cookbooks which ones are the most featured ones?

Any good reading / recommendation on how to do this?

[1] The most important vars is $id which is used for instance as part of the: DHCP domain, DNS zone, NFS domain, Samba workgroup, LDAP dn, etc etc. So a user from one network can access the same services just changing the $id

Many thanks!

--

Albert.

http://www.albertdelafuente.com