I am a beginner to chef and vagrant, and am sure I had it all working the other day, then it all break (yes, I now do have svn setup so this doesn’t happen again, that was some laziness on my part).

So when I run vagrant up, all seems well unless I have either apache or apt enabled, in which case I get an error in the fashion:

[2013-02-05T08:51:55+01:00] ERROR: Running exception handlers
[2013-02-05T08:51:55+01:00] ERROR: Exception handlers complete
[2013-02-05T08:51:56+01:00] FATAL: Stacktrace dumped to /tmp/vagrant-chef-1/chef-stacktrace.out
[2013-02-05T08:51:56+01:00] FATAL: Mixlib::ShellOut::ShellCommandFailed: service[apache2] (apache2::default line 221) had an error: Mixlib::ShellOut::ShellCommandFailed: Expected process to exit with [0], but received '1'
---- Begin output of /etc/init.d/apache2 start ----
STDOUT: * Starting web server apache2
   ...fail!
STDERR: Syntax error on line 2 of /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/my_site.conf:
ServerName takes one argument, The hostname and port of the server
---- End output of /etc/init.d/apache2 start ----
Ran /etc/init.d/apache2 start returned 1

Not sure where to start with this, but some advice would be very much appreciated, even if just some ideas on how to debug. What with chef seperating my config from actual code (eg. vhost files) I am not sure where to start.

Is it possible that when I run vagrant halt it stores all the previous config we had setup maybe? If so, should I use vagrant destroy (or does that actually delete the physical files from my machine?)

Thanks for any advice you can give, Dan

Hi,

I have a lot of virtual hosts in apache2 and the only thing differentiating them is ServerName, I was thinking about creating a attribute with a array of all the ServerNames and generate them with a ERB template. I’m not really sure what would be the correct approach?

Any suggestions?

Thanks

When I add either apache or apt and run vagrant up I end up with a nice long error of the fashion below:

[2013-02-05T09:15:53+01:00] ERROR: Running exception handlers
[2013-02-05T09:15:53+01:00] ERROR: Exception handlers complete
[2013-02-05T09:15:53+01:00] FATAL: Stacktrace dumped to /tmp/vagrant-chef-1/chef-stacktrace.out
[2013-02-05T09:15:53+01:00] FATAL: Chef::Exceptions::Exec: package[apache2] (apt::default line 20) had an error: Chef::Exceptions::Exec: apt-get -q -y install apache2=2.2.14-5ubuntu8.9 returned 100, expected 0

Now, I fixed this in the past by using vagrant ssh and running the apt-get install command. But I would rather chef automated this update itself. Is this possible, and do others have any similar issues? I am running this against a lucid32 box.

Thanks for any advice you can give, Dan

Hi all,

Chef seems really cool, and I’m about to start playing around with it, but based on my initial readings I’m still confused about one thing. Ideally, I’d like to be able to use Chef to easily assign roles to various machines (e.g. when I assign a machine to be a dns slave, it would create alias interfaces, install packages, copy config, start the service, etc) So clearly Chef is is designed to be good at this. What’s not so clear is what happens when I revoke the role and assign it to another machine. I haven’t been able to easily find any examples of what happens — while it would be great if Chef magically knew how to reverse its previous actions when the role was revoked, this seems like a pretty hard problem. It seems like this is the one case where you have to do things by hand. Is my understanding correct? If chef does have some way of rolling back previous config, how exactly does is work (I’m happy to look at source code). For instance, I could imagine that they only way this could work is if you take an all or nothing approach with Chef — so for instance, if you list ALL services, interfaces, packages that should be on a box, then Chef would know to stop any services, interfaces, uninstall packages that were not to suppose to be there — I’m pretty cool with this approach, but then that leads to the obvious question of suppose I have a hand tweaked system and now want to creating a baseline Chef config from where I can go forwards, are there good tools for this, what’s the safest way to may sure Chef doesn’t uninstall a bunch of stuff because I forgot to include it?

Thanks very much for any advice!

Best, nehal

I am returning to my newb status with Chef after a three week hiatus, and I note the Quick Start has changed. After insuring my script to make a new machine a chef-client worked, I created a new VM and went through the tutorial.

All is well until I get to this section: “Bootstrap the Ubuntu system” At that point it seems the command given in the example needs to run on a Chef Server rather than a client. (I am certainly not sure of this.) The IP in the command is not given context (is it the IP of the client, the chef server, etc.)

I am currently working with the free Opscode Management Console, so if I need to run a cmd like this it is unclear how I would do this.

I will be happy to edit the wiki when I have a grasp of what is going on here.

Thanks for your time. Boyd

Chef 11 breaks several scripts I used which parsed the JSON output of a knife command.

Old format, Chef 10.16:

mojomac:matterhorn-chef Mojo$ knife search node "name:intmhc1" -a ipaddress -fj
{
  "results": 1,
  "rows": [
    {
      "ipaddress": "10.190.6.40",
      "id": "intmhc1"
    }
  ]
}

Chef 11 format:

mojomac:matterhorn-chef Mojo$ knife search node "name:intmhc1" -a ipaddress -fj
{
  "results": 1,
  "rows": [
    {
      "intmhc1": {
        "ipaddress": "10.190.6.40"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Now to get the ID, I have to take rows[index].keys.first, and to get ipaddress rows[index][rows[index].keys.first][“ipaddress”]

I take it no one else has a problem with this? % )

HI,
Im working with chef about 2 months and i couldn’t find out what the “button” –> “RUN LIST” should do on the WebUi?!
At the beginning with chef i thought that it could be used to send a “run chef-client NOW” to the node. But it wouldn’t work. At the platform side i found out that when you mouse over the button you see the list of cookbooks which the node will perform.

SO my question is:
“ What is the function of this button”