[chef] Re: how to know if a chef-client run is occuring

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Wednesday, August 21, 2013 at 9:22 AM, Michael Hart wrote:

Is there a definitive way of querying the chef server to see if a chef-client run is occurring on a node? We've noticed that a "knife status" will return a timestamp of "382528 hours ago", or however many hours you are away from epoch, and but it's not entirely consistent and using that in code feels like a bit of a hack. Ideally I'd like an API to return true or false if a chef-client run is occurring. Thoughts?

Chef client communicates over HTTP, which is a stateless protocol, so there's no robust way for the server to know anything other than the last time a client made a request.

In Enterprise Chef (née Hosted and Private Chef), upcoming updates will include a node run history reporting feature that emulates the ability to track running clients by having them check in at the beginning and end of a run. How much of this makes it into the open source version and when is an open question at this point, but you could use a custom event dispatcher to track the state of clients in a similar way by integrating with a different system.

 

cheers

mike

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Michael Hart

Arctic Wolf Networks

M: 226.388.4773

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Daniel DeLeo