Client.rb interval ignored?

Chef Infra (archive)
1

I’m slowly ramping up my understanding of Chef. I have a chef-server and have built a PXE/Kickstart process that automatically installs Ubuntu Server and installs the chef client in the %post% part of the installation. I have debugged this process to the point that I’m comfortable that it’s working properly.

During this process, a client.rb is built that has an interval of 300 seconds (5 minutes).

However, I’ve observed by watching tail -f /var/log/chef/client.log that the client is only checking in with the server every half hour.

I’d like to reduce this interval, at least for a short while after the client is bootstrapped, so that the Chef client can finish my server’s build process without waiting half an hour.

My client.rb looks like:

log_level :info log_location STDOUT chef_server_url "https://myserver/organizations/myorg" validation_ley "/etc/chef/my-validator.pem" validation_client_name "my-validator" interval 300

This is the client.rb that’s in place when the client first runs and registers itself with the Chef server.

Is there something else I need to do in order to get the client to check in with the server on a 5 minute interval?

2

how about adding a line to do a `sudo chef-client’ once your bootstrap is
completed? This will kick start a chef-client run and still keep the
schedule to 5mins for other times.

3

I’m just going to put this (pxe_dust cookbook) here. It sounds like you’ve already done the work, but this is a cookbook that does what you’re describing.

You may want to steal somethings from it to help you out.