Lead Image © Sebastian Kaulitzki, 123RF.com

Setting up Windows clients with Chef

Menu of the Day

Article from ADMIN 35/2016

By Tam Hanna

Chef administrators unafraid of a learning curve can employ a powerful tool for Windows client management. Teamed with PowerShell, it offers more than some system management suites.

Chef is one of the most powerful open source tools for automated configuration management. Little known, however, is that Chef also supports Windows. Like Puppet, Chef [1] extends classic configuration scripts to include a context. Whereas Puppet works with tree configurations, those created using Chef take the form of cookbooks. These are scripts that describe the resources you want to create. The Chef run time processes the resources linearly and applies any changes that are not in place on the target system. This approach offers advantages compared with transactions implemented in Puppet, because the process is easier to understand: Graph theory is not necessary to understand the operation flow.

Getting Started with Chef

Chef offers Chef Solo, a standalone version of the system configurator, but I will not be using it in the following steps. Instead, I will be relying on a classic client/server configuration. For the remainder of this article, I use VMware Workstation as the basis; however, you could also use VirtualBox. Start by setting up an Ubuntu-based virtual machine (VM). The Chef server is only available on Unix-style operating systems; the download page [2] offers a choice between 64-bit versions for Red Hat Enterprise and Ubuntu. After downloading the 500MB DEB file, install it in the usual way from the Ubuntu Software Center and acknowledge any errors relating to the package quality.

To reconfigure the server, use the command:

sudo chef-server-ctl reconfigure

This procedure can take a few minutes. After completing the work, a message telling you Chef Client finished , or something of that ilk, then appears. Now you have to create the user and organization – they are essential for managing the configuration data:

...

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).