i'm getting started with chef. being able to use the knife install command for dependencies is a must. i do not have the resources for a chef server machine at the moment, but i hope to in the future, and as such would prefer not to use hosted chef. at this point, it seems like my best option is a git repo for my own "chef-repo", with git submodules for things like environments and cookbooks as they become necessary. this seems like it will be a pain. anyone have a better idea?

Wow, I didn't run out of close votes!

@dyelawn Paying someone to take your pain away seems like it might be a good idea in some circumstances.

thank you. but not a real answer

@dyelawn There's a lot more eyes on questions on the main site

Yeah, but that would get hit with "not constructive" pretty fast.

@ShaneMadden thanks. didn't think this warranted a real question though. i don't have enough rep to be losing it

The real problem is it's the weekend, and the only people here are those of us who either (1) have no life, or (2) are working.

(3) both

And, I personally use Puppet.

Same.

uhoh, don't mean to start another great puppet chef war

Haha, what war? That would be a rout :)

Haha, I don't have anything against Chef, I just don't have much experience with it.

@dyelawn SaltStack, fools!

Never trust a cat.

(and cfengine cowers in the corner eating paste)

@WesleyDavid heard about it third, already read two sets of docs, said meh

But yeah, hosted chef is really expensive and I can't figure out why.

I like the idea of salt. Using the templating language in the yaml files seemed just hideous though.

$120 a month for 20 managed nodes? I'm in the wrong hosting business.

i don't have enough tech knowledge, or frankly enough scale for it to really matter. i'm a designer who wants to be a dev who wants to be a sysadmin, so ruby and JSON won over a new language construct.

wait wait wait, yaml? i might have to look again

Aww see now you gone and done it, @ShaneMadden.

@WesleyDavid Hah!

ideally i'd have my own chef server, but i can't afford to leave an m1.small instance running to set up 6/8 machines a month

@WesleyDavid Yeah, I'm seriously thinking about doing a hosted puppet service. As soon as they implement the necessary features.

@MichaelHampton Not a bad idea! I think there's merit and plenty, plenty of customers.

Oh, there's your problem, you're on EC2.

Maybe I'll have to do a hosted saltstack.

@MichaelHampton invested too much time in it not to be

@MichaelHampton I was actually thinking that would be a good idea. What features are missing?

not because of any practical reasons like money, just bc i'm extremely stubborn

@WesleyDavid I actually had a chat with the Puppet UX people a few months back about it.

Hi everyone, I have a question that has been driving me mad, but, will probably get closed on the site!... There is a strange thing in Windows networking where you can have a gateway OUTSIDE of your subnet, and, as long as it is contactable, everything works fine! I know this works in Linux with some ARP tricks, but, I am not sure how/why it works in Windows out the box - I was wondering if this is a bug, or if this behaviour is defined in some obscure RFC somewhere?

@ShaneMadden The ability to restrict what users can see.

@WilliamHilsum That's interesting - I've never tried that.

tbh i do prefer the way puppet handles dependencies, though

@WilliamHilsum I think that would be a bug, but am not familiar enough with the range of networking RFCs to say definitively. Windows plays fast and loose with the TCP/IP stack though - witness Vista and autoscaling.

If you think interesting, do you think it is ok to ask on the website? Just sounded like something weird that may be closed

@MichaelHampton Why not just do a master process instance per client?

@WilliamHilsum I think it would be okay - you've got my upboat.

@ShaneMadden That's not the real problem, the real problem is the web front end.

seems like chef's pricing model (and inconveniencing of people who want to hold their own sh*t), they're trying to make themselves "indispensable"

@MichaelHampton That's what I was thinking. I figured there would have to be a lot of customization to the UI to get a hosted instance working.

@WilliamHilsum That's really strange. What did you do to confirm it works on windows?

@MichaelHampton Just dashboard or?

@dyelawn The pricing model definitely doesn't seem like it's made to focus on resources, but more prestige.

@WesleyDavid If I got really bored one weekend I might be tempted to do my own web front end (would probably have to anyway) but I haven't had the time yet.

@ShaneMadden Yeah, dashboard, AND puppet enterprise. Guess which one will get the feature first?

@ShaneMadden set local ip to 192.168.2.5/24 and set gateway to 192.168.1.1 (the real one), and, everything just worked! I remember reading about this ages ago about having a gateway outside your local lan as OVH assign /32 subnets

tell you what puppet/chef could both stand to do, though: take a look at vagrant's docs

Meh. If Vagrant wasn't so tied to VirtualBox it might actually be interesting.

@MichaelHampton Heh. Well what I'd do would be to spin up a separate puppetdb instance and dashboard per client - none of 'em are good at isolation so just separate it all.