Need confirmation on setting up chef server for the first time using knife-server command

Chef Infra (archive)
1

Hi guys,

Great software!. My first time deploying a Chef server. Excuse any
unreasonable questions :slight_smile:

  1. Is knife-server command only userful for setting up a Chef server on
    EC2? The descript said “Amazon’s EC2 or a standalone server.” But the line
    under the heading “Usage” it said rolling on EC2.
  2. Does standalone server means any computer that I own? Not hosted
    services?

I have a machine called hosts all the authentication across the network we
are working on. We want to run chef server on this machine. We made a
special user used for chef-related operations.

  1. So how do I use knife-server to create chef server on that machine? I
    haven’t installed any chef on any node / server. Do I need chef-solo? The
    github guide isn’t clear to me. Although Opscode has a very well-documented
    wiki, it’s actually quite confusing because there are simply too many
    options.

Can someone please point out to me what exactly need to be installed in
chronological order, please? I’ve read the doc many times. Thanks.

John

2

Hi,

  1. Take a look into this bootstrap script it's quite self-descriptive

https://github.com/fnichol/knife-server/blob/master/lib/chef/knife/bootstrap/chef-server-debian.erb

  1. You can use your own server. But knife-server has bootstrap script only
    for debian/ubuntu, however you can create your own very similiar script for
    other distro.
  2. knife server bootstrap [hostname] [options] - see
    GitHub - fnichol/knife-server: A Chef Knife plugin to manage Chef Servers. Bootstrap a new Chef Server on Amazon's EC2, Digital Ocean, Linode, OpenStack or a standalone server. Backup and restore your Chef Server or Hosted Chef's node, role, data bag, and environment JSON data.

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 6:52 AM, John Wong gokoproject@gmail.com wrote:

Hi guys,

Great software!. My first time deploying a Chef server. Excuse any
unreasonable questions :slight_smile:

  1. Is knife-server command only userful for setting up a Chef server on
    EC2? The descript said "Amazon's EC2 or a standalone server." But the line
    under the heading "Usage" it said rolling on EC2.
  2. Does standalone server means any computer that I own? Not hosted
    services?

I have a machine called hosts all the authentication across the network we
are working on. We want to run chef server on this machine. We made a
special user used for chef-related operations.

  1. So how do I use knife-server to create chef server on that machine? I
    haven't installed any chef on any node / server. Do I need chef-solo? The
    github guide isn't clear to me. Although Opscode has a very well-documented
    wiki, it's actually quite confusing because there are simply too many
    options.

Can someone please point out to me what exactly need to be installed in
chronological order, please? I've read the doc many times. Thanks.

John

3

Thank you,

I've looked at the source code. Knife-server seems to rely on Apache2. But
the server which I want to use as Chef Server is now running Nginx.

This server holds the LDAP master record, which authenticates all the
servers across our lab machines. We initially considered Puppet, but no
luck.

So what should I do?

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 3:47 AM, Igor Afonov afonov@gmail.com wrote:

Hi,

  1. Take a look into this bootstrap script it's quite self-descriptive

https://github.com/fnichol/knife-server/blob/master/lib/chef/knife/bootstrap/chef-server-debian.erb

  1. You can use your own server. But knife-server has bootstrap script only
    for debian/ubuntu, however you can create your own very similiar script for
    other distro.
  2. knife server bootstrap [hostname] [options] - see
    GitHub - fnichol/knife-server: A Chef Knife plugin to manage Chef Servers. Bootstrap a new Chef Server on Amazon's EC2, Digital Ocean, Linode, OpenStack or a standalone server. Backup and restore your Chef Server or Hosted Chef's node, role, data bag, and environment JSON data.

On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 6:52 AM, John Wong gokoproject@gmail.com wrote:

Hi guys,

Great software!. My first time deploying a Chef server. Excuse any
unreasonable questions :slight_smile:

  1. Is knife-server command only userful for setting up a Chef server on
    EC2? The descript said "Amazon's EC2 or a standalone server." But the line
    under the heading "Usage" it said rolling on EC2.
  2. Does standalone server means any computer that I own? Not hosted
    services?

I have a machine called hosts all the authentication across the network
we are working on. We want to run chef server on this machine. We made a
special user used for chef-related operations.

  1. So how do I use knife-server to create chef server on that machine? I
    haven't installed any chef on any node / server. Do I need chef-solo? The
    github guide isn't clear to me. Although Opscode has a very well-documented
    wiki, it's actually quite confusing because there are simply too many
    options.

Can someone please point out to me what exactly need to be installed in
chronological order, please? I've read the doc many times. Thanks.

John