[chef] Chef feature howtodo

[Chris Magnuson < >]

I¹m in a Chef class today and it¹s pretty fun.

My only previous experience with config mgmt is with Puppet and I¹m trying
to figure out how to do one thing in Chef that I could do there.

In Puppet I could define a single flat-text file with parameters about all
the client/node devices (IP, hostname, which packages to install,
parameters for them etc) then if the Puppet service on the server was
started, and one of the client nodes (specified in that config file)
contacted the server at some later time then the client node would get set
up per the config.

The beauty of this was just that you didn¹t need a workstation to do knife
bootstrap and things like that. If the client had the required client
software already installed and it contacted the server then it would get
configs/packages installed that the server had for it.

What approach could I use with Chef to do something similar?

Thanks!

Chris