Chef – Deans Blog

Chef – Creating encrypted data bags with Knife Solo

November 8, 2015

In order to use data bags with Chef Solo there is a requirement to use the knife-solo_data_bag plugin maintained by Tommy Bishop which allows you to work withchef-solo and data bags. Once we have obtained the plugin, we will need to install the rubygem in our existing envrionment and configure the knife-solo plugin. gem install knife-solo_data_bag Once installed we can … More Chef – Creating encrypted data bags with Knife Solo

Chef and non-zero return codes

November 6, 2015

When installing a windows package using the windows_package resource the install may report a failure if the non zero return code is considered to be an installation failure. In my example, the package would return the code 3010, which states a restart is required to complete the installation. However, we can use the success_code attribute parameter … More Chef and non-zero return codes

Windows File System Redirector with Chef Client/Ruby

November 5, 2015

I was recently using the windows_zipfile resource to unzip content to the path C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules as part of a recipe in a Chef cookbook which would complete successfully, but on observation would unzip the contents to C:\Windows\SysWow64\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules and cause an error when further resources references this source. The cause of this behaviour is due to the the chef-client … More Windows File System Redirector with Chef Client/Ruby

Nagios XI: Automating Host Management

August 13, 2015

I was recently looking at how to automate adding and removing managed hosts and services in Nagios XI, which can be particularly useful in cloud computing and large environments where configuration management solutions have been implemented for provisioning. In these environments we typically use configuration files based on the attributes of a server role during the provisioning … More Nagios XI: Automating Host Management

ChefConf 2014: PowerChef – Enhanced Powershell Integration For Chef Recipes

April 25, 2014

Below is a link to a presentation by Adam Edwards from the recent #chefconf, for those that interested in integrating Powershell within their Chef recipes. The presentation highlights the use of guard to evaluate conditions during execution on the chef client, guard interpreters to evaluate string commands and also the integration of Chef with PowerShell Desired State … More ChefConf 2014: PowerChef – Enhanced Powershell Integration For Chef Recipes