[chef] Service startup and error handling

[Giovanni Toraldo < >]

Ohai Chefs,

when provisioning an EC2 micro instance to be used as a very basic
LAMP server, I get an error during the chef run when the database dump
should be loaded on the database (connection refused - port 3306
unreachable).

However, the subsequent run go fine, without any additional tricks
done manually.

I think that there is no assurance that between a service declared as
'started' (with the community mysql cookbook recipe) is really ready
to handle client requests (and I know, using a low resource instance
like the micro doesn't helps at all).

I am wondering if someone else got this problem, and if there is a way
to avoid to fix things on the next run (we are hot-deploying
web-applications, and it should be as fast as possible since an user
is waiting for it).

Can I trap the error raised by the execute resource (used to restore
the database dump), and retry it a few times before finally exit with
error?

Thanks!

-- 
Giovanni Toraldo
http://gionn.net