Oscar The Chef

Can you smell what Oscar is cookin'?

My Chef Envrionment Topology

• Your workstation is the computer from which you author your cookbooks and administer your network. It's typically the machine you use everyday. Although you'll be configuring Ubuntu, your workstation can be any OS you choose – be it Linux, macOS, or Windows.

• Your Chef server acts as a central repository for your cookbooks as well as for information about every node it manages. For example, the Chef server knows a node's fully qualified domain name (FQDN) and its platform.

• A node is any computer that is managed by a Chef server. Every node has the Chef client installed on it. The Chef client talks to the Chef server. A node can be any physical or virtual machine in your network.

Getting Started

To get started, first bring up the Vagrant environment by executing the following

$ vagrant up

The Vagrantfile contains two provisioning scripts, one for the Chef Server and one for the Node server.

The Server Script

This script does the following

• Peform updates to the Linux box
• Sync time
• Download the Chef Server version indicated in the script
• Install Chef Server
• Install Chef Web Management Portal
• Create an admin user (this is helpful for when you sign into the web management portal)
• Ensures services are up and running
• Copy the private key to the chef server

The Node Script

• Does an apt update
• Creates host entry to ensure chef-server.test is reachable

Bootstrap Nodes

After the Chef Server and the two nodes have been provisioned, we must bootstrap the nodes by executing the following from the chef-server directory

$ ./setup.sh

The script does the following

• Fetch and check SSL keys
• Bootstrap both Node1 and Node2 using knife
• Run Berks install
• Run SSL_CERT_FILE='.chef/trusted_certs/chef-server_test.crt' berks upload to upload all Cookbooks to Chef Server
• Upload both Roles to Chef Server knife role from file roles/web.json && knife role from file roles/database.json