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

[Douglas Garstang < >]

Kevin,

My boot process runs a script that calls a knife node add, to add the node to chef. Since it's been added to chef, it should be discoverable. However, it's not discoverable until the client has run at least once. That seems more like an architectural problem with chef, rather than a fundamental flaw in the universe. :)

What prevents me from doing a two pass run is that I would have to take a process that works fine, and add a hack to make it work when a chef search is required. Every node would have to run twice, or I would have to create some criteria, maybe have CloudFormation put a 'needs-chef-hack' EC2 tag on the instance, and then my scripts check for that. This really isn't very elegant.

What if I modified my boot scripts to run chef twice. The first run would essentially be to call a dummy cookbook that does nothing. After this has run, the node would be discoverable? Plenty of other folks must have this same issue.

Doug.

On Sat, Jun 13, 2015 at 1:43 PM, Kevin Keane Subscription < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

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 < " target="_blank"> >
Sent: Friday 12th June 2015 22:01
To: " target="_blank">
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

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Regards,

Douglas Garstang
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