[chef] Re: Question about using databag and also about using Ohai in recipe?

[Galen Emery < >]

Jim,

I'd recommend looking at the Windows_AD cookbook: https://github.com/TAMUArch/cookbook.windows_ad

While they don't use data bags, you could easily pass in items to the resources to handle multiple domains.  Or, use a data bag to loop through the various domains and make it happen.

On Sat, Jun 20, 2015 at 9:29 PM, o haya < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Hi,

I'm still really new with Chef and kind of struggling with some of the concepts and tools, but I currently have a test/experimental cookbook recipe that does dcpromo on a Windows server, i.e., it turns the Windows server into a domain controller.

This recipe uses information from a databag to get the domain name (and the netbios name) and the admin password from a databag.

The data in databag currently looks like:

{
  "id": "main",
  "domain_name": "whatever.com",
  "domain_netbios_name": "whatever",
  "admin_password": "Pxxxxx"
}


For a test environment I'm trying to setup, I actually need to AD-enable several domain controllers, so I've been trying to think of how to extend what I've done with Chef thus far, so that I could have one cookbook/recipe that would be able to do that.

I'm thinking that maybe I could have information for multiple domains in the databag, something like:

{

{
  "id": "main",
  "domain_name": "whatever.com",
  "domain_netbios_name": "whatever",
  "admin_password": "Pxxxxx"
},

{
  "id": "whatever1",
  "domain_name": "whatever1.com",
  "domain_netbios_name": "whatever1",
  "admin_password": "Pxxxxx"
},

{
  "id": "whatever2",
  "domain_name": "whatever2.com",
  "domain_netbios_name": "whatever2",
  "admin_password": "Pxxxxx"
}

}


and then, in the recipe, load the databag/item using ohai 'node['hostname']', instead of the hard-coded 'main'.

In other words, instead of having:

begin
  dcpromote = Chef::DataBagItem.load('dcpromote', 'main')
rescue
  Chef::Log.fatal("Could not find the 'main' item in the 'dcpromote' data bag - Raising fatal error!!")
  raise
end

I'd have:

begin
  dcpromote = Chef::DataBagItem.load('dcpromote', node['hostname'])
rescue
  Chef::Log.fatal("Could not find the 'main' item in the 'dcpromote' data bag - Raising fatal error!!")
  raise
end


Is that the correct way to get the (short) hostname from ohai?  And, overall, would the approach that I've described above work?

Is there maybe a better way to do this (using Chef)?  At one point, I was thinking of using roles, but then it seemed like I'd end up having to create one role for each of the specific domain controller nodes?

Thanks,
Jim

--

Galen Emery — Automation Engineer

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