If you're a network manager/sysadmin, welcome!
Stored here is the Chef repository that manages Davis House Cooperative's servers.
The Chef server is a Hosted Enterprise Chef solution which is free for under 5 machines. It allows you to maintain and update a server remotely, safely, and (relatively) simply.
Chef uses cookbooks, which rely on recipes, to ensure that your server always gets your order (network configuration) right!
Our server, a CentOS machine in the network closet, is a Chef client. To update it according to the stored cookbooks, use chef-client.
You can use a tool called knife to make changes to the cookbooks stored on our remote Chef server.
Let's say, for example, you wanted to make a change to the local Davis website.
The files for the website are stored on our web server, which is managed by Chef, which refers to a recipe stored here, on Github.
You would want to:
- Clone the davis-configs repository
- Update the davis-website files, just like they're normal html/css/js (which they are)
- Push the change to github
knife upload cookbook davis-websiteto update the cookbook- ssh to our web server and
sudo chef-client
And you're done!
More info can be found on https://learn.chef.io/tutorials/
TODO
- Find out how to 'Chefify' the FreeNAS server. Alternatively, move the FreeNAS server to a different OS
- Move UniFi Chef setup to the new chef stuffs