[chef] Re: chef clients out of sync with master

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Thursday, December 5, 2013 at 2:47 PM, Tim Dunphy wrote:

Hey all,

I've recently setup a little test lab with chef intended to control several hosts.

I'm running chef 11.8.2 on an ubuntu 13.10 server.If I run chef-client manually on the hosts that are falling behind, it catches up with the server and the web UI in on the chef server reports that they are in sync. But if I leave it alone for a while this happens again, until I run it manually. Short of setting up a cron job to keep the hosts in sync, is there a more elegant solution to this problem? How do I troubleshoot this from a chef perspective?

Thanks
Tim

The status page assumes you’re running chef either daemonized or from cron, and something is wrong if chef hasn’t run in a while. If you agree with that, then you should run chef daemonized or via cron. If you have a good reason not to do that, then you should agree to disagree with what the status page is telling you and ignore it.

FWIW, the status page is kind of a primitive attempt at a reporting system from long before Opscode had enough engineering resources to write such a thing. The paid Chef server versions are getting a much more advanced reporting system now: http://www.opscode.com/blog/2013/12/05/announcing-the-release-of-management-console-and-reporting-1-0-0-for-enterprise-chef/

If you’d prefer to stick with the OSS version, you can integrate Chef with a different system via report handlers:

* Existing 3rd party: http://docs.opscode.com/community_plugin_report_handler.html

* Write your own: http://docs.opscode.com/essentials_handlers.html

Or using the event stream (which is what the client-side code for the paid reporting feature does).

* Example: https://github.com/opscode/chef/blob/master/lib/chef/resource_reporter.rb

HTH, 

-- 

Daniel DeLeo