[chef] chef-client and error handlers

[michael david mosier < >]

Thank you everyone for helping me  with naming conventions.

I have another question. Again I am fairly new to this so I may have 
just not learned how this works yet.


If someone has 1000 nodes. Going to each machine and running chef-client 
doesn't feel like it's the best way to do things. I know on the 
enterprise side they have a push type plugin. I also know with knife I 
can force a push to all the nodes. The problem I see with this is you 
may need to write an error handler into a recipe so you will know that 
something that was just updated on the node errored out. If your on each 
machine you can see on the screen if it errored out when you run 
chef-client but remotely I am not sure how to handle catching errors. I 
was thinking since there are two built in error handlers maybe I could 
write a script that would email me whenever an error occurs but that may 
mean that each node has to have send-mail running.

1. How do you all deal with updating multiple nodes without SSHing to 
each and running chef-client

2. How do you all deal with error  handling.

Thank yo so much

Michael D. Mosier
Systems Guy
University Of Texas
Astro Physics