Home / user-92608

rizen's questions

Martin Hope
rizen
Asked: 2011-09-24 12:27:26 +0800 CST
  • 48

I use and love Puppet. I moved to a new company and they are adopting Chef. So I'm trying to learn Chef but am having a hard time piecing it all together because I still think in Puppet =)

These are my questions:

  • Is it better to setup roles in Ruby DSL, JSON, or from the management console? Why are there multiple ways to do the same thing?
  • Can you organize cookbooks into subdirectories? eg: we have custom software that I'd like to write a cookbook for and stick that into: chef-repo/cookbooks/ourcompanystuff/customsoftwarecookbook would this be a good practice?
  • Do I create a cookbook for each type of role that specifies what it does? Do I have these cookbooks include other cookbooks (i.e. the cookbook for my webserver role includes the apache cookbook). I'm not sure how cookbook inter-dependencies and inheritance are handled.
  • Is there anything like Puppet's external node classifier so nodes automatically determine their roles?
  • It seems like you can configure things with knife or within the management console, or editing JSON files? This is super confusing to me why there are so many ways to do things, it's paralyzing! Is there a reason to use one or the other? Coming from puppet it seems like it'd be easy to accidentally mis-configure something with these tools (i.e.- leaving something out)
  • How can I automatically provision nodes with Chef in my dev cluster? With Puppet I fire up a VM that connects to the puppermaster and kicks off a puppet run and sets itself up (role is determined by external node classifier). How do I do this with Chef? Install chef with pem/rb files that tie it to a chef server, manually tell the node its roles with knife or editing this in the management interface, and then kicking off a chef-client run to set itself up?

I completed the getting started tutorials and I see they have EC2 tutorials, but I've never used EC2 so they're hard for me to follow. At this point I have hosted Chef running and I'm starting to play around with configuring a single node. Where do I go from here? Do I need to start looking at the public cookbooks?

The docs on Opscode are ok, but not nearly as great as Puppet's. Are there any other good Chef resources I might be missing in my searches?

configuration-management chef
Martin Hope
rizen
Asked: 2011-08-25 07:43:24 +0800 CST
  • 1

Possible Duplicate:
free memory in Linux

I'm trying to determine if my server needs more memory.

free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          7993       7719        274          0        372       5866
-/+ buffers/cache:       1480       6513
Swap:        11617          0      11616

The cached is high and free is low (the server handles a lot of requests). Is this indicative that the server could benefit from additional memory since all free memory is being used as cache?

linux memory