Introduction
Going back in time to early 2000s, one can find a lot of businesses on “web hosting” or providing services directly from bare-metal servers. After all, the “cloud” only became a thing and gained traction in the last 5 to 10 years. Many such businesses survived to present day.
What was (and in many scenarios still is) the reality of being able to provide services from a colocated or on-premises bare-metal server?
The physical server had to be purchased before anything else; there were requirements on the enclosure size that sometimes prevented consumer-grade hardware from being used;
The operating system had to be installed by hand, from installation media;
The configuration was a tedious process, with many details being fixed throughout the days after going live.
The setup was performed on a freshly installed CentOS 6 VM using a “minimal ISO” image from the CentOS Project website. The VM was set up on a local VirtualBox installation, all settings being left to default except for the memory which was increased from 512Mb to 1Gb. Of course, the more, the better, but 1Gb is the lowest one can go without facing serious memory swapping.
Initial Setup
The successful Centos 6 installation leaves the external network interface disabled upon the initial boot, so this must be fixed before anything else. One must look into /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and change the ONBOOT parameter from no to yes. Afterwards, the network subsystem must be restarted, e.g.:
# vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 ... ONBOOT=yes ... # service network restart
Once the VM gets Internet access, it’s a good practice to update everything and reboot it before going forward with the Chef Server installation:
# yum -y update # reboot
There is one important change one must perform in order to get the Chef Server properly set up: the hostname, as localhost.localdomain won’t do. The hostname must also be associated to a static IP address, which can be achieved in VirtualBox by playing with some networking settings (not presented here).
Inside the VM, this is easy to put in place:
The big data repository known as Chef Server is manipulated with a tool called knife. The general (simplified) syntax for this tool is:
$ knife category command item
The category can be one of: environment, client, node, data bag, cookbook, … The full list can be found here.
The command (usually) is one of create, list, show, edit or delete. There are more commands, though, depending on what is being requested through knife.
On the cheat sheat itself, let’s start with some classics: