[chef] Re: Issues with chef-client service

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Tuesday, April 1, 2014 at 1:41 PM, Stewart, Curtis wrote:

> We’re currently using the chef-client cookbook to setup a service (init by 
> default) so chef-client runs on a specified interval. We’re also using the 
> default value of 1800 (seconds) for the interval.
>  
> Apparently some of our runs take more than 1800 seconds, which is OK, 
> however, the service stops running and logs a FATAL error, "FATAL: Chef is 
> already running pid 21697”.  
>  
> I’m going to up the interval to just once a day, but I’m wondering if there 
> are solutions to skipping a converge if there’s already one running. I’d 
> like to avoid scenarios in the future where the service does not start back 
> up. At this point, we have to manually start the service back up if it ever 
> fails.  
>  
> Thanks,
> Curtis  

If you run a single daemonized instance of chef-client, then the length of 
your run should not matter, because the interval is the time that chef client 
sleeps in between runs, not how often it tries to start a run. This behavior 
sounds like you have chef-client running via cron and init at the same time. 
Did you ever check if pid 21697 was alive and a running instance of 
chef-client?


--  
Daniel DeLeo