Best Practice for setting unique Chef Node Attributes

Question

I am attempting to use Chef to manage new virtual machines. I'm using a dedicated Chef server and doing all this work from a separate workstation vm.

The way I am currently doing it is cloning a base vm image then using knife bootstrap to install Chef and bring the vm to a consistent state.

I can specify an environment or run list for the vm; I can override certain settings in my environment, e.g. I have the chef-client interval in the "overrides" block of the test environment set to run the client every 60 while I'm testing so I don't have to manually run chef-client every time.

For instance, my workflow is this:

clone vm template and start vm
set the hostname manually (update /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts) and reboot
Bootstrap the node with the initial recipes

knife bootstrap chef-test1 -r 'recipe[ntp],recipe[chef-client]'
edit the node to reflect the new environment

The problem I am having is setting per-node attributes. I would like to use the hostname cookbook to set the node's hostname, if I set this in a role then each server would have to have a new role created. But when I attempt to bootstrap and include this role I get an error:

chef-test1   * log[Please set the set_fqdn attribute to desired hostname] action write[2013-12-09T16:26:56-07:00] WARN: Please set the set_fqdn attribute to desired hostname

When I bootstrap without that recipe and attempt to edit the node and set the "set_fqdn" attribute, I am unable to save the attribute, e.g. this json:

{
  "name": "chef-test1",
  "set_fqdn": "chef-test1.local.fqdn",
  "chef_environment": "test-dev1",
  "normal": {
    "tags": [

    ]
  },
  "run_list": [
    "recipe[ntp]",
    "recipe[chef-client]",
    "recipe[hostname]"
  ]
}

when I exit out of my editor, knife tells me:

Node not updated, skipping node save

I attempted to edit this attribute in the chef gui and the attribute won't save.

I found this guy who is creating the json in /etc/chef/chef.json, doing basically what I would expect, but I'm not sure how /etc/chef/chef.json comes into play (update it for each new node? I'm not using chef-solo so maybe that's where my confusion is).

According to this email thread it's not possible to override default attributes with knife node edit, but "set_fqdn" isn't a default. I would like to avoid creating a role for each node, and I think I can use the hostname cookbook to alleviate the need to manually set the hostname, something like:

knife bootstrap saucy64 -r 'recipe[ntp],recipe[chef-client],recipe[hostname]' --json '"{ set_fqdn": "chef-test1.local.tld", "chef_client": { "interval": "600" }'

knife bootstrap fedora19 -r 'recipe[ntp],recipe[chef-client],recipe[hostname]' --json '"{ set_fqdn": "chef-test2.local.tld", "chef_client": { "interval": "60" }'

I appreciate the assistance.

Best Practice for setting unique Chef Node Attributes

3 Answers