Yesterday Opscode, the company behind Chef, announced the first ever chef cookbook contest. In order to participate in the contest you will need to write a new cookbook and submit it by the end of September; this is going to be a little tricky as there are many cookbooks already available on the community site. So this is a great idea and it will take care of the few applications that don’t already have chef cookbooks. The cookbooks which shows off the awesome Chef features will have better chances to win. The prizes are also interesting: iPad, gift cards, etc. Here are the full details and rules of the contest: http://www.opscode.com/blog/2011/08/22/cookbook-contest/

So if you have an idea for a chef cookbook, now it’s the time to start working on it. I’m offering my help for free for all my blog readers: I will help you write a cookbook by implementing your ideas; help reviewing it or suggest improvements, or whatever else you might need help with. Use the contact form to email me (or DM me on twitter) and let me know how I can help.

If you don’t have time to write a new cookbook but you have a great idea for a cookbook that is missing from the opscode community site, please post it bellow in the comments section and I’m sure some of my blog readers will help create it.

Again this is a brilliant idea from Opscode and it creates a win-win situation for everyone. I’m just curious, is this the first idea from their new community manager? If this is the case, great job Jesse .

If you used vagrant (great tool, right?) you have probably downloaded a basebox from some remote location to get you started. This is a great quick start, and there are many good boxes out there that you can use; vagrantbox.es does a great job in listing various public vagrant boxes. But if you are like me, you probably will want to customize the boxes you are using; you might want to install them from scratch based on your own little/or/big customizations. Well if you are like that, then you will be happy to hear that Patrick Debois had exactly the same problem when he decided to write veewee. And veewee is exactly that missing part of vagrant that allows you to easily build your own vagrant boxes from scratch.

So let’s see how we can use veewee. I’m assuming you already have vagrant installed (and virtualbox), but if you don’t please install them first. To install veewee we just have to install the veewee gem:
gem install veewee
once you installed veewee you can see a new task added to vagrant: basebox.

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A few days ago Opscode released a security fix for chef server 0.10.0 and 0.9.16 and this post will show how upgrade to chef-server 0.10.2. First start by backing up your data. Seriously. In the past I’ve had serious problems when performing similar upgrades (even a minor one like this that looks harmless), and even if now opscode are much better with this process it never hurts to be precautions. Since I use a rubygem install the next steps will focus on this type of installation; if you are using distribution or opscode packages this will not be very helpful as probably packages are not yet available for this upgrade; once they will replace the gem upgrade part with the deb/rpm upgrade and you should be set.

1. Stop all the chef related services

Here is a handy command that will stop all the possible chef server related services:
for svc in server server-webui solr expander
do
sudo /etc/init.d/chef-${svc} stop
done

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Here are the slides from my presentation about Chef at the SF Bay Area Large-Scale Production Engineering meetup group. Accordingly to the organizers from Yahoo, there were 90 people present. If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area and passionate about infrastructure you should definitely join this group. Highly recommended!

I’ve just released a simple chef cookbook that will install nodejs from source. You can check it out directly from github or download it from the opscode cookbook site. Let me know what you think if you find it useful.

The moment I heard about the Open Source Bridge Configuration Management panel session on FLOSS Weekly a while ago, I was hoping that I will be able to see the recording of this session (as for obvious reasons I was not able to attend and see this live in Portland, Oregon). They managed to bring together (for the first time to my knowledge) the creators (or maintainers) of *all* the major configuration management tools to date was very impressive; and obviously someone as myself that has been working with many of these tools (I haven’t tried/used automateit yet) would definitely see this as a great session.

Here are the members of the configuration management panel (from left to right):

• Igal Koshevoy of AutomateIt
• Brendan Strejcek of Cfengine
• Luke Kanies from Reductive Labs for Puppet
• Narayan Desai of bcfg2
• Adam Jacob from Opscode for Chef

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The Bcfg2 version available in debian etch is quite old (v0.8.6), while the one in lenny is newer v0.9.5.7, it still isn’t the latest stable version 0.9.6 that was released in November last year. Since this version fixes many bugs it is the version that is recommended to use in production at this time (unfortunately it breaks the reporting system, that will not be fixed until the release 1.0 planed for the next months). This post will show how we can rebuild a debian package for the latest stable bcfg2 release so we can easily deploy it on several machines.

Bcfg2 is a debian friendly project, meaning they provide inside the source package all what is needed to build a debian package very easy. We will use for this a debian etch system, but this should work on any debian based system. Read the rest of this entry »

SSHbase is a bcfg2 plugin for managing ssh host keys. It is responsible for making ssh keys persist beyond a client rebuild and building a consistent ssh_known_hosts file including all the ssh keys and deploying it across all the systems bcfg2 manages.

SSHbase has two basic functions:

• to generate ssh host keys; if a system has not a key in the repository, it will be generated on its first check-in
• to maintain a consistent ssh_known_hosts file, and deploy it to all systems. This will include all the public keys in the repository.

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