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Posts published in “Sysadmin”

Simple update and clone an Amazon EC2 EBS Boot image

Introduction Well there is already an update to Chef’s Ohai library. At first I thought, “Oh no, I have to generate another EC2 image”. But then I remember reading that you can update and clone a running EBS boot image. One of the cool features of using an Amazon EC2 instance that boots from an EBS Snapshot is that its…

Using the Official Opscode 0.8.x Gems to build EC2 AMI Chef Client and Server

Updates Mar 3, 2010 Added call to script ec2-set-defaults that is normally called on ec2 init that sets the locale and apt sources for EC availability Zone Introduction Opscode has officially released 0.8.x of Chef. It is now even more fabulous. I’ve been using the pre-release version for the last couple of months and it is rock steady and very…

Reseting the Opscode Chef Server Validation key/pem

In upgrading from my own custom hacked pre-0.8.x Chef server/clients to the official new and shiny 0.8.2 release, I wanted to make everything vanilla. One issue was somewhere along the line I set the validation_client_name to “validator”. The vanilla setting is “chef-validator”. To do this I had to get rid of the “validator” and “chef-validator” authentication client entries I had…

Upstart Documentation Secret Hiding Place

To quote the Upstart home page: is an event-based replacement for theĀ /sbin/init daemon which handles starting of tasks and services duringboot, stopping them during shutdown and supervising them while the system is running. One would think that the best place to find the current documentation on Upstart would be its home page and/or the Upstart Wiki. But you would be…

Creating an Amazon EC2 AMI for Opscode Chef 0.8 Client and Server

Changes Since Original 1/13/10: Fix various minor inaccuracies and improved description on how to set up the chef-server. Also removed nanite as a requirement (its no longer used) 1/17/10: Add the requirement to build and install mixlib-authentication for the chef-client 1/21/10: Added a mkdir for /var/log/chef 1/22/10: Added step to insure that /tmp permissions are set Introduction Here’s my experience…

Building Opscode Chef 0.8.x from HEAD of the git repo

Update: I am having problems using the chef dev tools/client from the HEAD of the chef git repository with the Opscode Alpha Server service. I’m not sure if its me or if the latest versions of the chef client from HEAD is compatible with the Alpha Server Service. So the following is still useful for understanding how to build from…