# Chef, CentOS/RedHat, and rubygem-rest-client updates

**URL:** <https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755>\
**Category:** Chef Infra (archive)\
**Created:** [March 25, 2011, 12:07pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755 "2011-03-25T12:07:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 17\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Michael\_Stillwell](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/michael_stillwell/32/674_2.png) [@Michael\_Stillwell](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Michael_Stillwell)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 12:07pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/1 "2011-03-25T12:07:38Z")

</div>

What's the status of chef on CentOS/RedHat? We've currently installed  
chef as described at

[http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+RHEL+and+CentOS+5+with+RPMs](http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+RHEL+and+CentOS+5+with+RPMs)

but I get the feeling that chef isn't very well supported on  
CentOS/RedHat. For example, the latest RPM packaged version is 0.9.8,  
which is quite old, and isn't packaged by Opscode anyway. (Unlike the  
Debian/Ubuntu packages.) One of its dependencies is  
rubygem-rest-client (from EPEL), and this was updated to version 1.6.1  
in the last day or so, which breaks chef-client 0.9.8:

# chef-client

/usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:827:in  
`report\_activate\_error': RubyGem version error: rest-client(1.6.1 not

> = 1.0.4, \<= 1.5.1) (Gem::LoadError)  
> from /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:261:in `activate' from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:296:in `activate'  
> from /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:295:in `each' from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:295:in `activate'  
> from /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:68:in `gem'  
> from /usr/bin/chef-client:18

Will chef + CentOS be a viable combination in the future, or should I  
look to moving to a different distribution? (Or figure out how to  
install/package chef myself, which might be about as much work...)

Cheers,  
Michael

--

> **[Michael Stillwell](https://beebo.org/)**

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Charles\_Duffy](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/charles_duffy/32/793_2.png) [@Charles\_Duffy](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Charles_Duffy)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 2:19pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/2 "2011-03-25T14:19:51Z")

</div>

I run Chef 0.9.14 on CentOS quite happily. A few caveats:

- Upstream Ruby 1.8.7 (_not_ the Enterprise Ruby equivalent) is needed for  
the server -- I use it everywhere, with a StackScript (my VPS provider is  
Linode; these are their paradigm for post-installation scriptage) installing  
the interpreter in /opt/ruby when my nodes are provisioned. (I also have  
some equivalent veewee scripts for building appropriate Vagrant baseboxes,  
and can publish these if desired).
- Use gems, not RPMs, for package management.
- Expect to need to modify many of the Opscode recipes.

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 7:07 AM, Michael Stillwell [mjs@beebo.org](mailto:mjs@beebo.org) wrote:

> What's the status of chef on CentOS/RedHat? We've currently installed  
> chef as described at
> 
> [http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+RHEL+and+CentOS+5+with+RPMs](http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+RHEL+and+CentOS+5+with+RPMs)
> 
> but I get the feeling that chef isn't very well supported on  
> CentOS/RedHat. For example, the latest RPM packaged version is 0.9.8,  
> which is quite old, and isn't packaged by Opscode anyway. (Unlike the  
> Debian/Ubuntu packages.) One of its dependencies is  
> rubygem-rest-client (from EPEL), and this was updated to version 1.6.1  
> in the last day or so, which breaks chef-client 0.9.8:
> 
> # chef-client
> 
> /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:827:in  
> `report\_activate\_error': RubyGem version error: rest-client(1.6.1 not
> 
> > = 1.0.4, \<= 1.5.1) (Gem::LoadError)  
> > from /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:261:in `activate' from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:296:in `activate'  
> > from /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:295:in `each' from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:295:in `activate'  
> > from /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:68:in `gem'  
> > from /usr/bin/chef-client:18
> 
> Will chef + CentOS be a viable combination in the future, or should I  
> look to moving to a different distribution? (Or figure out how to  
> install/package chef myself, which might be about as much work...)
> 
> Cheers,  
> Michael
> 
> --  
> [http://beebo.org](http://beebo.org)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![John\_E\_Vincent\_lusis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c89c15/32.png) [@John\_E\_Vincent\_lusis](https://discourse.chef.io/u/John_E_Vincent_lusis)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 2:37pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/3 "2011-03-25T14:37:32Z")

</div>

Michael,

There are tons of us who are using chef-client on CentOS5. The trick,  
which may not be documented cleanly in the wiki, is to use a custom  
bootstrap file. Don't rely on any packaged RPMs of chef-client. The  
server component is a bit more work.

One thing you'll find, however, is that most/many of the cookbooks are  
designed around ubuntu. You'll spend a good bit of time working to  
massage those into a RHEL/CentOS world view.

If you need any advice/tips, I'm usually on IRC during the day and can  
throw a few gists/github repos your way to help out.

Just look for 'lusis' in #Chef Infra (archive).

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 8:07 AM, Michael Stillwell [mjs@beebo.org](mailto:mjs@beebo.org) wrote:

> What's the status of chef on CentOS/RedHat? We've currently installed  
> chef as described at
> 
> [http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+RHEL+and+CentOS+5+with+RPMs](http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+RHEL+and+CentOS+5+with+RPMs)
> 
> but I get the feeling that chef isn't very well supported on  
> CentOS/RedHat. For example, the latest RPM packaged version is 0.9.8,  
> which is quite old, and isn't packaged by Opscode anyway. (Unlike the  
> Debian/Ubuntu packages.) One of its dependencies is  
> rubygem-rest-client (from EPEL), and this was updated to version 1.6.1  
> in the last day or so, which breaks chef-client 0.9.8:
> 
> # chef-client
> 
> /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:827:in  
> `report\_activate\_error': RubyGem version error: rest-client(1.6.1 not
> 
> > = 1.0.4, \<= 1.5.1) (Gem::LoadError)  
> > from /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:261:in `activate' from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:296:in `activate'  
> > from /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:295:in `each' from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:295:in `activate'  
> > from /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:68:in `gem'  
> > from /usr/bin/chef-client:18
> 
> Will chef + CentOS be a viable combination in the future, or should I  
> look to moving to a different distribution? (Or figure out how to  
> install/package chef myself, which might be about as much work...)
> 
> Cheers,  
> Michael
> 
> --  
> [http://beebo.org](http://beebo.org)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Seth\_Chisamore](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/seth_chisamore/32/488_2.png) [@Seth\_Chisamore](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Seth_Chisamore)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 2:42pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/4 "2011-03-25T14:42:32Z")

</div>

And beware CentOS's env\_reset in the default /etc/sudoers file. More here:  
[http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/User+Environment+PATH+Sanity](http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/User+Environment+PATH+Sanity)

Basically if you run "sudo chef-client" data will not be collected by Ohai correctly. This can easily be remedied by running "chef-client" as root...or having a custom "/etc/sudoers" file.

Seth

--  
Opscode, Inc.  
Seth Chisamore, Technical Evangelist  
T: (404) 348-0505 E: [schisamo@opscode.com](mailto:schisamo@opscode.com)  
Twitter, IRC, Github: schisamo

On Friday, March 25, 2011 at 10:37 AM, John E. Vincent (lusis) wrote:

> Michael,
> 
> There are tons of us who are using chef-client on CentOS5. The trick,  
> which may not be documented cleanly in the wiki, is to use a custom  
> bootstrap file. Don't rely on any packaged RPMs of chef-client. The  
> server component is a bit more work.
> 
> One thing you'll find, however, is that most/many of the cookbooks are  
> designed around ubuntu. You'll spend a good bit of time working to  
> massage those into a RHEL/CentOS world view.
> 
> If you need any advice/tips, I'm usually on IRC during the day and can  
> throw a few gists/github repos your way to help out.
> 
> Just look for 'lusis' in #Chef Infra (archive).
> 
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 8:07 AM, Michael Stillwell [mjs@beebo.org](mailto:mjs@beebo.org) wrote:
> 
> > What's the status of chef on CentOS/RedHat? We've currently installed  
> > chef as described at
> > 
> > [http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+RHEL+and+CentOS+5+with+RPMs](http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+RHEL+and+CentOS+5+with+RPMs)
> > 
> > but I get the feeling that chef isn't very well supported on  
> > CentOS/RedHat. For example, the latest RPM packaged version is 0.9.8,  
> > which is quite old, and isn't packaged by Opscode anyway. (Unlike the  
> > Debian/Ubuntu packages.) One of its dependencies is  
> > rubygem-rest-client (from EPEL), and this was updated to version 1.6.1  
> > in the last day or so, which breaks chef-client 0.9.8:
> > 
> > # chef-client
> > 
> > /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:827:in  
> > `report\_activate\_error': RubyGem version error: rest-client(1.6.1 not
> > 
> > > = 1.0.4, \<= 1.5.1) (Gem::LoadError)  
> > > from /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:261:in `activate' from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:296:in `activate'  
> > > from /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:295:in `each' from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:295:in `activate'  
> > > from /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:68:in `gem'  
> > > from /usr/bin/chef-client:18
> > 
> > Will chef + CentOS be a viable combination in the future, or should I  
> > look to moving to a different distribution? (Or figure out how to  
> > install/package chef myself, which might be about as much work...)
> > 
> > Cheers,  
> > Michael
> > 
> > --  
> > [http://beebo.org](http://beebo.org)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Joshua\_Timberman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/joshua_timberman/32/424_2.png) [@Joshua\_Timberman](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Joshua_Timberman)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 5:14pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/5 "2011-03-25T17:14:10Z")

</div>

Ohai!

On Mar 25, 2011, at 8:37 AM, John E. Vincent (lusis) wrote:

> One thing you'll find, however, is that most/many of the cookbooks are  
> designed around ubuntu. You'll spend a good bit of time working to  
> massage those into a RHEL/CentOS world view.

And we're working to improve those in the near future :-).

--  
Opscode, Inc  
Joshua Timberman, Technical Evangelist  
IRC, Skype, Twitter, Github: jtimberman

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![KC\_Braunschweig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ea5d25/32.png) [@KC\_Braunschweig](https://discourse.chef.io/u/KC_Braunschweig)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 5:46pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/6 "2011-03-25T17:46:30Z")

</div>

+1 for better RHEL/CentOS support and supported RPMs especially. I  
really like Chef but it's a hard sell at a company with hundreds or  
thousands of RHEL servers at the moment. A couple of you mentioned  
only using gems, but going that route I seem to keep hitting Ruby path  
issues. Plus I don't really like the idea of having to install  
compilers and devel packages on all my prod machines so they can gem  
install various libraries. Wondering if I need to break down and just  
roll my own RPMs until Opscode has a supported yum repo.

KC Braunschweig

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Joshua Timberman [joshua@opscode.com](mailto:joshua@opscode.com) wrote:

> Ohai!  
> And we're working to improve those in the near future :-).

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Sean\_OMeara](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/sean_omeara/32/435_2.png) [@Sean\_OMeara](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Sean_OMeara)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 6:00pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/7 "2011-03-25T18:00:23Z")

</div>

I maintain RPMs targeted towards Fedora. They should work on RHEL6 /  
SL6 and Centos6 whenever they get around to putting it out

[http://yum.afistfulofservers.net/affs-chef/fedora/13/x86\_64/](http://yum.afistfulofservers.net/affs-chef/fedora/13/x86_64/)

-s

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 1:46 PM, KC Braunschweig  
[kcbraunschweig@gmail.com](mailto:kcbraunschweig@gmail.com) wrote:

> +1 for better RHEL/CentOS support and supported RPMs especially. I  
> really like Chef but it's a hard sell at a company with hundreds or  
> thousands of RHEL servers at the moment. A couple of you mentioned  
> only using gems, but going that route I seem to keep hitting Ruby path  
> issues. Plus I don't really like the idea of having to install  
> compilers and devel packages on all my prod machines so they can gem  
> install various libraries. Wondering if I need to break down and just  
> roll my own RPMs until Opscode has a supported yum repo.
> 
> KC Braunschweig
> 
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Joshua Timberman [joshua@opscode.com](mailto:joshua@opscode.com) wrote:
> 
> > Ohai!  
> > And we're working to improve those in the near future :-).

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Paul\_Choi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/43a26b/32.png) [@Paul\_Choi](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Paul_Choi)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 6:04pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/8 "2011-03-25T18:04:16Z")

</div>

We use Chef with CentOS 5 at Plaxo. CentOS 4 also, although the init  
script is a bit broken but it was a minor fix.

I agree that the packages are heavily Ubuntu-oriented. But Plaxo had its  
own way of doing things, so I had to roll out my own cookbooks anyhow.  
(That's why it's probably not worth sharing with the community, because  
they're not really generically applicable).

I'm using 0.9.14 and it's been working out fine. I started with EPEL+ELFF  
RPMs, and then I started building my own rubygems-chef RPMs as needed.  
You'd also want to upgrade CouchDB, because the EPEL's CouchDB is 0.11.2,  
and it's somewhat unstable. I used EPEL's SRPM as the basis for 1.0.2, and  
it's been running fine since then.

I rely on my own shell script to bootstrap. We have physical servers and  
VMWare Vms, and there's no nice way to do this via knife at this point.  
You can install Chef and assign a run\_list to the host with kickstart's  
post script, but I find that you'd have to be pretty disciplined about  
pre-assigning proper hostname and IP in DHCP.

-Paul

On 3/25/11 5:07 AM, "Michael Stillwell" [mjs@beebo.org](mailto:mjs@beebo.org) wrote:

> What's the status of chef on CentOS/RedHat? We've currently installed  
> chef as described at
> 
> [http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+RHEL+and+CentOS+5+wit](http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+RHEL+and+CentOS+5+wit)  
> h+RPMs
> 
> but I get the feeling that chef isn't very well supported on  
> CentOS/RedHat. For example, the latest RPM packaged version is 0.9.8,  
> which is quite old, and isn't packaged by Opscode anyway. (Unlike the  
> Debian/Ubuntu packages.) One of its dependencies is  
> rubygem-rest-client (from EPEL), and this was updated to version 1.6.1  
> in the last day or so, which breaks chef-client 0.9.8:
> 
> # chef-client
> 
> /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:827:in  
> `report\_activate\_error': RubyGem version error: rest-client(1.6.1 not
> 
> > = 1.0.4, \<= 1.5.1) (Gem::LoadError)  
> > from /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:261:in `activate' from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:296:in `activate'  
> > from /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:295:in `each' from /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:295:in `activate'  
> > from /usr/lib/ruby/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:68:in `gem'  
> > from /usr/bin/chef-client:18
> 
> Will chef + CentOS be a viable combination in the future, or should I  
> look to moving to a different distribution? (Or figure out how to  
> install/package chef myself, which might be about as much work...)
> 
> Cheers,  
> Michael
> 
> --  
> [http://beebo.org](http://beebo.org)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![John\_E\_Vincent\_lusis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c89c15/32.png) [@John\_E\_Vincent\_lusis](https://discourse.chef.io/u/John_E_Vincent_lusis)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 6:07pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/9 "2011-03-25T18:07:55Z")

</div>

KC,

As far as rolling your own RPMS and needing compilers, I would HIGHLY  
suggest looking at FPM to roll your RPMS. \*I've actually built a few  
scripts to create ruby 1.9.2 RPMS for RHEL5 boxen for each arch and it  
would be just as easy (because FPM supports gems to rpm) to use the  
same "build" system to package the chef-client and dependent gems.

Another option that I've been trying to push my various opscode  
friends into is trying to ensure that at a minimum, the client works  
under jruby. Then it's an even easier packaging scenario.

- [GitHub - lusis/fpm-scripts: Set of scripts to build various packages with fpm](https://github.com/lusis/fpm-scripts)
- [881068’s gists · GitHub](https://gist.github.com/881068)

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 1:46 PM, KC Braunschweig  
[kcbraunschweig@gmail.com](mailto:kcbraunschweig@gmail.com) wrote:

> +1 for better RHEL/CentOS support and supported RPMs especially. I  
> really like Chef but it's a hard sell at a company with hundreds or  
> thousands of RHEL servers at the moment. A couple of you mentioned  
> only using gems, but going that route I seem to keep hitting Ruby path  
> issues. Plus I don't really like the idea of having to install  
> compilers and devel packages on all my prod machines so they can gem  
> install various libraries. Wondering if I need to break down and just  
> roll my own RPMs until Opscode has a supported yum repo.
> 
> KC Braunschweig
> 
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Joshua Timberman [joshua@opscode.com](mailto:joshua@opscode.com) wrote:
> 
> > Ohai!  
> > And we're working to improve those in the near future :-).

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Paul\_Choi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/43a26b/32.png) [@Paul\_Choi](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Paul_Choi)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 6:11pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/10 "2011-03-25T18:11:00Z")

</div>

Now that you mention hundreds or thousands of servers...  
What's the biggest that you find Chef can handle? I probably have about  
100-ish hosts in Chef, and probably more in the near future. I have 6 thin  
processes running chef-server and sometimes I find that it's pretty slow.  
Running on 4 cores, 16GB RAM (excessive I know), and I find that it's  
pretty CPU-bound, often busy at chef-server.

-Paul

On 3/25/11 11:00 AM, "Sean OMeara" [someara@gmail.com](mailto:someara@gmail.com) wrote:

> I maintain RPMs targeted towards Fedora. They should work on RHEL6 /  
> SL6 and Centos6 whenever they get around to putting it out
> 
> [http://yum.afistfulofservers.net/affs-chef/fedora/13/x86\_64/](http://yum.afistfulofservers.net/affs-chef/fedora/13/x86_64/)
> 
> -s
> 
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 1:46 PM, KC Braunschweig  
> [kcbraunschweig@gmail.com](mailto:kcbraunschweig@gmail.com) wrote:
> 
> > +1 for better RHEL/CentOS support and supported RPMs especially. I  
> > really like Chef but it's a hard sell at a company with hundreds or  
> > thousands of RHEL servers at the moment. A couple of you mentioned  
> > only using gems, but going that route I seem to keep hitting Ruby path  
> > issues. Plus I don't really like the idea of having to install  
> > compilers and devel packages on all my prod machines so they can gem  
> > install various libraries. Wondering if I need to break down and just  
> > roll my own RPMs until Opscode has a supported yum repo.
> > 
> > KC Braunschweig
> > 
> > On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Joshua Timberman [joshua@opscode.com](mailto:joshua@opscode.com)  
> > wrote:
> > 
> > > Ohai!  
> > > And we're working to improve those in the near future :-).

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![John\_E\_Vincent\_lusis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c89c15/32.png) [@John\_E\_Vincent\_lusis](https://discourse.chef.io/u/John_E_Vincent_lusis)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 6:16pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/11 "2011-03-25T18:16:06Z")

</div>

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 2:11 PM, Paul Choi [paulchoi@plaxo.com](mailto:paulchoi@plaxo.com) wrote:

> Now that you mention hundreds or thousands of servers...  
> What's the biggest that you find Chef can handle? I probably have about  
> 100-ish hosts in Chef, and probably more in the near future. I have 6 thin  
> processes running chef-server and sometimes I find that it's pretty slow.  
> Running on 4 cores, 16GB RAM (excessive I know), and I find that it's  
> pretty CPU-bound, often busy at chef-server.
> 
> -Paul

Have you moved Couch/Rabbit/solr to it's own distinct resources yet?  
That would be my first step if not.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![KC\_Braunschweig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ea5d25/32.png) [@KC\_Braunschweig](https://discourse.chef.io/u/KC_Braunschweig)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 6:20pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/12 "2011-03-25T18:20:54Z")

</div>

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 11:11 AM, Paul Choi [paulchoi@plaxo.com](mailto:paulchoi@plaxo.com) wrote:

> Now that you mention hundreds or thousands of servers...  
> What's the biggest that you find Chef can handle?

We don't have much of a rollout yet. Still working with the issues  
mentioned. Definitely post your experiences as you scale your Chef  
server though as that's next on the list to tackle. With so many folks  
using the platform, those of us running chef server ourselves have to  
stick together. 🙂

KC

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Paul\_Choi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/43a26b/32.png) [@Paul\_Choi](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Paul_Choi)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 6:24pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/13 "2011-03-25T18:24:39Z")

</div>

Is there any documentation on specifying a separate host for  
Couchdb/rabbit or solr? Server.rb assumes everything is localhost at this  
point. FYI, I'm still running 0.9.8 on server, and 0.9.14 on clients.

-Paul

On 3/25/11 11:16 AM, "John E. Vincent (lusis)"  
[lusis.org+chef-list@gmail.com](mailto:lusis.org+chef-list@gmail.com) wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 2:11 PM, Paul Choi [paulchoi@plaxo.com](mailto:paulchoi@plaxo.com) wrote:
> 
> > Now that you mention hundreds or thousands of servers...  
> > What's the biggest that you find Chef can handle? I probably have about  
> > 100-ish hosts in Chef, and probably more in the near future. I have 6  
> > thin  
> > processes running chef-server and sometimes I find that it's pretty  
> > slow.  
> > Running on 4 cores, 16GB RAM (excessive I know), and I find that it's  
> > pretty CPU-bound, often busy at chef-server.
> > 
> > -Paul
> 
> Have you moved Couch/Rabbit/solr to it's own distinct resources yet?  
> That would be my first step if not.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Paul\_Choi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/43a26b/32.png) [@Paul\_Choi](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Paul_Choi)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 6:35pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/14 "2011-03-25T18:35:30Z")

</div>

Well, I found that you can set "couchdb\_url" in /etc/chef/server.rb... By  
grepping through chef gem's lib dir...

Although, if there's a doc page that I can just look at for available  
params, without grepping through the source, that'd be great. Or if  
there's some ruby way of generating documentation (like rdoc?)? But I'm  
not all that familiar with Ruby ecosystem.

And after upgrading couchdb from 0.11 to 1.0.2, couchdb seems slower...  
I'm going to have to dig into that deeper.

-Paul

On 3/25/11 11:24 AM, "Paul Choi" [paulchoi@plaxo.com](mailto:paulchoi@plaxo.com) wrote:

> Is there any documentation on specifying a separate host for  
> Couchdb/rabbit or solr? Server.rb assumes everything is localhost at this  
> point. FYI, I'm still running 0.9.8 on server, and 0.9.14 on clients.
> 
> -Paul
> 
> On 3/25/11 11:16 AM, "John E. Vincent (lusis)"  
> [lusis.org+chef-list@gmail.com](mailto:lusis.org+chef-list@gmail.com) wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 2:11 PM, Paul Choi [paulchoi@plaxo.com](mailto:paulchoi@plaxo.com) wrote:
> > 
> > > Now that you mention hundreds or thousands of servers...  
> > > What's the biggest that you find Chef can handle? I probably have about  
> > > 100-ish hosts in Chef, and probably more in the near future. I have 6  
> > > thin  
> > > processes running chef-server and sometimes I find that it's pretty  
> > > slow.  
> > > Running on 4 cores, 16GB RAM (excessive I know), and I find that it's  
> > > pretty CPU-bound, often busy at chef-server.
> > > 
> > > -Paul
> > 
> > Have you moved Couch/Rabbit/solr to it's own distinct resources yet?  
> > That would be my first step if not.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![John\_E\_Vincent\_lusis](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c89c15/32.png) [@John\_E\_Vincent\_lusis](https://discourse.chef.io/u/John_E_Vincent_lusis)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 6:41pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/15 "2011-03-25T18:41:09Z")

</div>

Off hand, I'm not sure. Worse case you could iptable the ports locally  
to the remote servers.

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 2:24 PM, Paul Choi [paulchoi@plaxo.com](mailto:paulchoi@plaxo.com) wrote:

> Is there any documentation on specifying a separate host for  
> Couchdb/rabbit or solr? Server.rb assumes everything is localhost at this  
> point. FYI, I'm still running 0.9.8 on server, and 0.9.14 on clients.
> 
> -Paul
> 
> On 3/25/11 11:16 AM, "John E. Vincent (lusis)"  
> [lusis.org+chef-list@gmail.com](mailto:lusis.org+chef-list@gmail.com) wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 2:11 PM, Paul Choi [paulchoi@plaxo.com](mailto:paulchoi@plaxo.com) wrote:
> > 
> > > Now that you mention hundreds or thousands of servers...  
> > > What's the biggest that you find Chef can handle? I probably have about  
> > > 100-ish hosts in Chef, and probably more in the near future. I have 6  
> > > thin  
> > > processes running chef-server and sometimes I find that it's pretty  
> > > slow.  
> > > Running on 4 cores, 16GB RAM (excessive I know), and I find that it's  
> > > pretty CPU-bound, often busy at chef-server.
> > > 
> > > -Paul
> > 
> > Have you moved Couch/Rabbit/solr to it's own distinct resources yet?  
> > That would be my first step if not.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Eric\_Olivier\_Lamey](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/eric_olivier_lamey/32/276_2.png) [@Eric\_Olivier\_Lamey](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Eric_Olivier_Lamey)\
**Post date:** [March 25, 2011, 7:33pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/16 "2011-03-25T19:33:24Z")

</div>

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 1:07 PM, Michael Stillwell [mjs@beebo.org](mailto:mjs@beebo.org) wrote:

> What's the status of chef on CentOS/RedHat? We've currently installed  
> chef as described at
> 
> [http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+RHEL+and+CentOS+5+with+RPMs](http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Installation+on+RHEL+and+CentOS+5+with+RPMs)
> 
> but I get the feeling that chef isn't very well supported on  
> CentOS/RedHat. For example, the latest RPM packaged version is 0.9.8,  
> which is quite old, and isn't packaged by Opscode anyway. (Unlike the

Hi Michael,

As others have said, chef is working very nicely on CentOS 5, both as a  
server and as a client.

I have built my own RPMs of chef 0.9.14, using a bunch of files from  
ELFF (thanks guys!). They are available for CentOS 5 i386 and x86\_64  
here: [http://pakk.96b.it/repositories/el5/](http://pakk.96b.it/repositories/el5/)  
My packages are not really meant to be integrated with RedHat/CentOS'  
default ruby though, as I am also packaging ruby 1.9 (with a recent GC  
patch).

Installation is not well (err... at all) documented, but:

# rpm -ivh [http://pakk.96b.it/repositories/el5/](http://pakk.96b.it/repositories/el5/)/pakk-release.rpm

# yum install chef-client (or chef-server)

should work, where arch is either i386 or x86\_64.  
Please note that you need to configure EPEL's repositories before.

I am the only user of those packages (I have not yet publicly announced  
the repository), and they work for me, but if anyone has any problem  
with them, I'd be glad to help. Patches are even more welcomed, as  
the SPEC files are published here: [https://github.com/eolamey/pakk](https://github.com/eolamey/pakk)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Brian\_Akins](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.chef.io/brian_akins/32/298_2.png) [@Brian\_Akins](https://discourse.chef.io/u/Brian_Akins)\
**Post date:** [March 26, 2011, 1:33pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/chef-centos-redhat-and-rubygem-rest-client-updates/1755/17 "2011-03-26T13:33:19Z")

</div>

On Mar 25, 2011, at 2:11 PM, Paul Choi wrote:

> Running on 4 cores, 16GB RAM (excessive I know), and I find that it's  
> pretty CPU-bound, often busy at chef-server.

We use nginx in front of unicorn on our chef-server (16 ruby processes). We still run couchdb and solr on the same server. We replicated couch to a "cold" backup server. We run about the same number of clients now twice an hour and see ~ 10-15% CPU usage on an old 4-core server we currently use for chef-server. We will soon have a few thousand on it, so I'll let you know. I think letting nginx keep up with the client connections and keepalives helps a good bit. The ruby process only have to process well formed, very fast requests as nginx buffers both the request and the response, plus nginx takes up only a few MB of RAM.

--Brian