[chef] RE: Chef Search for Node Discovery.

[Kevin Keane Subscription < >]

Title: RE: [chef] Chef Search for Node Discovery.

It seems to me that this problem is fundamental, not specific to chef: you simply can't discover anything until it is discoverable. Making something discoverable in an automated fashion can happen only by running *something*. In chef, it's chef itself. The other option is to have a separate pre-registration process that pre-creates (and pre-populates) the nodes.

That is also quite possible in chef; you'd use knife (possibly from a shell script) to automatically create your nodes.

But in the end, that doesn't really solve your problem, it just moves it.

Kevin Keane

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-----Original message-----
From: Douglas Garstang < >
Sent: Friday 12th June 2015 22:01
To:
Subject: [chef] Chef Search for Node Discovery.

I haven't tried this for a while, so I thought I'd see if there was any progress.

I need to write a cookbook that discovers other chef nodes. The issue with chef search is that nodes don't report in until they've done their first chef client run, which means that the client has to run twice on the one doing the discovering, but... that also applies to the one that wants to be discovered. End result, not automated. This has basically made chef search unusable in every situation for me where it might otherwise be useful.

Is there a better way? I'm on EC2. My other option was to write an ohai plugin to scan ec2 and return instances matching the correct criteria.

Thanks,

Doug