Articles in the category "ops"

The State of Target Mode in 2020

The State of Target Mode in 2020 After my blog series on the agentless use of Chef dubbed “Target Mode” between August and October 2019, it is time to review what happened since. Updated 14th October 2020

Target Mode with Serial Devices

Target Mode with Serial Devices Usually, you will work with SSH or WinRM to connect to remote nodes and configure them. Those standard protocols bring along all the perks of a modern network connection: Encryption, Authentication, File transfers, etc But what if you have a device without network connectivity?

Custom Resource Diffs in Chef

Custom Resource Diffs in Chef If you are writing custom resources regularly, you might have been annoyed by a general “diff” functionality in Chef. In this post we will work on some snippets to make this possible

Writing Chef Target Mode Resources

Writing Chef Target Mode Resources After my previous blog posts, you might be tempted to write your own Chef custom resources which are compatible with Target Mode. Luckily, this is very easy - so this will be a short one.

Local Preprocessing in Target Mode

Local Preprocessing in Target Mode If you ever created configuration files with any automation system, you know that this involves a lot of templating. This is actually one of the most basic tasks that Chef performs and it is done using the template resource. With Chef’s Target Mode this currently is a bit more complicated.

Target Mode with Chef Server and Chef Automate

Target Mode with Chef Server and Chef Automate It is not sufficient to provision remote devices via Target Mode but we also want an overview of node attributes, run history and changed resources. In this post we have a look at how to connect agentless resources with central servers to give us the much-needed visibility.

Agentless Provisioning with Chef

Agentless Provisioning with Chef One of the main points of criticism about Chef I heard over the last few years has been the need to have an agent deployed at remote machines. Sometimes that is not desired, sometimes it is not even possible. Due to this, configuring remote machines has become the stronghold of other tools - but a new feature of Chef changes the landscape fundamentally.

Chef Interactive

As you probably are aware, Chef is a tool which is meant for automatic provisioning and configuring of systems. So if you have a particular problem falling outside of the regular use cases, both posts on the internet and support enquiries of any kind will probably result in one of two answers: “that is not possible” or “you are doing it wrong”. But - what if you really need this for a rather exotic task or even as an transitory solution?