Set up Chef

Creating a Chef workstation

Follow the instructions here to set up a Chef workstation so you can follow along. Mine is a Macbook Pro with RVM, ruby-1.9.2, and Chef installed from rubygems.

Create a new Hosted Chef organization or bring up a fresh open source chef-server instance.

Follow the instructions here to set up a Chef server so you can follow along.

Clone the affs-blog git repo

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git clone https://github.com/someara/affs-blog
git checkout 0.3.2

Configure the affs-blog repo to point to the chef-server

Download you knife.rb and validation.pem from Hosted Chef interface, or set up your open-source Chef server accordingly. See the knife configuraiton page here for help with knife

Upload the affs-blog repo contents to your Chef server

1 2	cd affs-blog rake install

Verify your Chef infrastructure

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knife node list # should be empty
knife node list # show your client cert
knife cookbook list # should list the contents of the affs-blog/cookbooks directory

Provision three Centos6 machines

The code that powers this article was written against 3 VMWare Fusion Centos 6 base installs with passwordless SSH to root setup. I stuck their IPs in my local /etc/hosts so I could address them as centos6-1, centos6-2, and centos6-3 respectively. Bare metal installs should work too.

WARNING: AWS or Rackspace based instances will NOT work when following along, since the code would grab the wrong IP off the network interfaces.

Protip: Since Centos6 comes with SELinux enabled by default, don’t forget to restorecon -R /root after you write your authorized_keys file.