I am trying to install Munin through hosted Chef on a Vagrant VM. When installing the Munin Client, it performs a search for the Munin Servers.

munin_servers = search(:node, "role:#{node['munin']['server_role']} AND chef_environment:#{node.chef_environment}")

However, this search is failing, with a 400 “Bad Request”. I did a quick check, and node[‘munin’][‘server_role’] is nil.

But how can that be? It defines what it is in the Cookbooks attribute file. It sets it to “Monitoring”. I wanted to change that, so in the my Role I have:

{
  "name": "munin-node",
  "description": "",
  "json_class": "Chef::Role",
  "default_attributes": {
    "munin": {
      "server_role": "munin-server"
    }
  },
  "override_attributes": {
  },
  "chef_type": "role",
  "run_list": [
    "recipe[munin::client]"
  ],
  "env_run_lists": {
  }
}

I define node[‘munin’][‘server_role’] in that file. In fact, I went as far as to print out the entire node object:

node.each do |k, v|
  puts "Key: #{k} and V: #{v}"
end

And it shows:

Key: munin and V: {"sysadmin_email"=>"ethan@cloudmine.me", "server_role"=>"munin-server", "server_auth_method"=>"htpasswd", "web_server"=>"apache", "web_server_port"=>8080, "basedir"=>"/etc/munin", "plugin_dir"=>"/usr/share/munin/plugins", "docroot"=>"/var/www/munin", "dbdir"=>"/var/lib/munin", "root"=>{"group"=>"root"}, "plugins"=>"/etc/munin/plugins", "tmpldir"=>"/etc/munin/templates", "max_graph_jobs"=>"6", "max_cgi_graph_jobs"=>"6", "max_processes"=>nil}

I see it! I see my server_role has been defined! It’s right here! So why is it nil when I access it? What is happening?

Chef Workstation Version: 10.24.0 Chef-Client Version: 10.24.0 Ruby Version: 1.9.3