For those that don’t know I’m a Chef for a living. Not the kind that works with food but one that works with code. What you may not know is I’m a FreeBSD guy, or at least claim to be one. I’ve been building a new FreeBSD workstation and discovered that there is no chef-dk for FreeBSD. Building it isn’t bad, but there is a trick to it. So without further ado, here is building Chef-DK for FreeBSD 10.3 (and probably most >=10.0) ...
I, like many sysadmins, really want to monitor all the things I actually care about. Monitoring is in general hard. Not because it’s hard to set up, but it’s hard to get right. It’s really easy to monitor ALL THE THINGS and then just end up with pager fatigue. It’s all about figuring out what you need to know and when you need to know it. So in This case I Really Need to Know that My Machines Are Staying in compliance with Chef There was a few ways you can do this. The first thought I had was adding a hook into all of my runs and having them report in on failure. This is mostly because I’m always looking for another way to hack on Chef and work on my ruby. The big problem with this is: ...
It’s been about a year since my last post, mostly frustrated with Chef as a beginner. Now I spend most of my day writing cookbooks and recipes. In fact I am even helping the Lead Dev at work learn Chef and got back from Chef conference. There I met a lot of amazing people and even offered to help maintain BSD support in chef. This post isn’t about that so much. It’s mostly about a behavior I noticed I picked up. When I worked for Stephens Media I spent a lot of my energy trying to contribute, in posts, open source, pull requests, ect. Then when I moved to Slickdeals.net my time was really sucked up. I drifted from working on Pelican and stopped doing as many pull requests. At some time I set up a personally hosted Stash instance. Then I locked that stash instance off behind a login. Then I started writing in my private confluence instead of here. Now all my projects these days are All Rights I noticed… hmph. ...
I’ve spent the last week working on implementing chef. The experience is frustrating to say the least. Instead of whining I wanted to take the time to write out some of my pain points and hopefully offer some constructive fixes to what I see as the wall in the learning curve. Now to be clear up front. Most of my problems aren’t with Chef, Ruby, or most of the core product; it’s with implementing it. To be more precise I think the failure REALLY is documentation. ...