[chef] Chef client managing remote systems?

[Rafał Trójniak < >]

Hello,

I'm currently on network conference, where lot of automation talks is
being performed. It's quite sad that there is almost no chef popping up
here.
There are agent-less tools used usually (like Ansible). There is a
simply reason for that:
  Most of specialized networking gear is not able to run ruby (chef).

Is there other way?

There are some auto-configuration tools that manage systems remotely
(using NetConf, SSH, Telnet or SNMP). What would need to be done to be
able to do it in chef ?  ( Like have a box or two, with chef client
configured to manage all the switches/routers in environment)

I have a simple example from the Ansible, which uses netconf [1]
The question:
 What Would I have to do to 
  - Disable all providers by default
  - Pass the 'managed' device locations (ip,port,type) to the chef
    client
  - Port OHAI so it can discover system information by SNMP/SSH/NetConf
  - Run only supported providers on the destination host
  - Separate all chef-client local state (caches, temp dirs)

Anybody tried that ?

Why would I want to do that ?
The gear is usually virtualized now, right ? We have Openstack, AWS
ans so one. But still someone has to manage the physical devices they
operate on. Also, some devices has to be physical (for performance
reasons) and interact with the services (like HW Load Balancers,
Routers, Firewalls, IPSes). It would be nice to have them covered by
Chef management.

Regards,

[1]
https://www.juniper.net/techpubs/en_US/junos-ansible1.0/topics/task/program/junos-ansible-playbooks-creating-executing.html


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Rafał Trójniak
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