metaxis / chef-fundamentals-repo

Chef repository for running the chef-fundamentals

Chef Repository for managing training lab instances for students taking a Chef Fundamentals or Chef Workshop training course.

Read this README in its entirety before setting up your lab.

Assumptions

This repository is intended for use by Opscode Chef instructors. If you are using it, we assume you know what you're doing.

This repository assumes that you have a sane Ruby/RubyGems installation. We use rbenv or rvm and Ruby 1.9. You will need bundler installed. You also need to have an Opscode Hosted Chef account and organization created that will manage the instances for initial setup.

Instances can be launched in Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Cloud. An account should be set up ahead of time.

Your cloud account's default security group should have the following ports open:

• 22 (SSH)
• 80, 81, 82 (HTTP)
• 5901-6001 (VNC)

The target instances are Ubuntu 12.04 for both Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud. Our training materials depend on assumptions from Ubuntu specifically.

Shell Environment

In order to make this repository modular for different people as trainers, specific settings are abstracted in the knife.rb config file. The following environment variables must be exported in your shell with the proper values beforehand.

• ORGNAME - the organization to use on Opscode Hosted Chef
• OPSCODE_USER - if your Opscode account username is different than your local user, set this
• AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY - normal AWS credentials
• AWS_SSH_KEY - the name of the SSH key pair to use, must already exist in your AWS account; add the private key to your SSH agent
• RACKSPACE_USERNAME and RACKSPACE_API_KEY - normal Rackspace Cloud credentials

E.g.,

export ORGNAME="myorg"
export OPSCODE_USER="jtimberman"
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="your aws access key id"
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="your aws secret access key"
export AWS_SSH_KEY="jtimberman"
export RACKSPACE_USERNAME="jtimberman-rackspace"
export RACKSPACE_API_KEY="your rackspace API key"

Installation

Install the appropriate RubyGems required using bundler.

bundle install

Gems that install programs require bundle exec to run (notably: spiceweasel, knife).

Spiceweasel

This repo has an lab.yml file for use with Spiceweasel (http://bit.ly/spcwsl). Run spiceweasel to display the knife commands required to deploy the infrastructure.

bundle exec spiceweasel lab.yml

Cookbooks and Roles

There are three roles and two cookbooks.

Roles

• classrom: the node that simply displays a list of all the IPs of the lab instances for workstations and targets.
• target: nodes that will be managed by students in the class.
• workstation: nodes that are provided for students to use as a development and knife workstation

Cookbooks

• classroom - Searches for all the workstation instances and target instances to make a list of IPs available on a web page that students can use. The node with this role is not used by the students, and is for the instructor.
• knife-workstation - Provides configuration for a "workstation" system that students can access via SSH or VNC (display 1). The recipe ensures that programmer style text editors are available, sets the ubuntu user password to "opscodechef", and enables VNC. The ssh recipe in this cookbook is used by the target role to ensure the ubuntu user password is set.

Knife Config and Bootstrap Template

.chef/knife.rb is not hardcoded with any values, and uses shell environment variables to set user-specifics. See Shell Environment above for variables that must be exported to the shell prior.

.chef/bootstrap/student.erb is a custom bootstrap template that will:

• Ensure that the GPG keys for the Ubuntu repository are added (may not exist on some AMIs in EC2). This is hardcoded to a specific key.
• Install the chef full stack client package.
• Connect the system via chef-client to the configured Opscode Hosted Chef organization and configure it based on its role.
• Clean up after itself, removing /etc/chef, /var/chef and uninstall the chef package.

To use Opscode Private Chef, change the chef_server_url.

The bootstrap and Chef is intended to run only once on target and workstation nodes, because they only run Chef to make their initial configuration, and have node objects available for the classroom node. Chef is not cleaned up on the classroom node because if an instance needs to be replaced, rerunning Chef will update the IP list.

Workstations & Targets

The AMI used by the workstation role for EC2 in lab.yml is currently private. It simply has the "workstation" packages preinstalled to save time launching instances. See workstation-ami.sh for the commands to create a new AMI.

Launch a workstation for each student registered for your class. Likewise, launch a target machine for each student. Once all these instances are complete, launch the classroom system. Set the number of instances to launch in lab.yml and Spiceweasel will print out all the commands you need.

knife ec2 server create -x ubuntu -I ami-f4fc5e9d -r 'role[workstation]'
knife ec2 server create -x ubuntu -I ami-a29943cb -r 'role[target]'
knife ec2 server create -x ubuntu -I ami-a29943cb -r 'role[classroom]'

Knife Plugin

Instead of launching the classroom system, you can also use the included knife plugin, knife lab to output the instances for students to use. For example:

% knife lab
https://opscode-chef-training.s3.amazonaws.com/ChefWorkshop-CheatSheet.pdf

# Workstations (SSH or VNC display :1)
184.72.153.99 opstrain1 # workstation

# Target nodes (SSH)
107.20.125.24 opstrain1 # target node

The CheatSheet PDF link is included for convenience.

To do:

• Use minitest-handler to perform integration testing of all the things!
• Clean up the older chef-fundamentals cruft.
• Release the "workstation" AMI; this requires ensuring it is cleaned up and fit for consumption by the masses.

License and Author

• Author:: Matt Ray ([email protected])
• Author:: Joshua Timberman ([email protected])

Copyright (c) 2012, Opscode, Inc ([email protected])

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.