Adventures with chef-server and Gentoo, part 9

Continued from Part 8

So my nifty Ghetto DNS for Rackspace Cloud backfired on me.

I spent several hours (!?) trying to figure out why (1) the recipe works on my dev environment, (2) the recipe works at our in-house Xen Cloud Server environment, and (3) the recipe refuses to work on the Rackspace Cloud Server.

I had narrowed it down to the fact that:

search(:node, "rackspace_private_ip:#{rackspace_hosts[:private_net]}" ) do |n|
  ip = n[:rackspace][:private_ip]
  hostnames = [ n[:fqdn] ]
  hostnames << (n[:rackspace][:private_aliases] || []).sort
  hosts[ip] = hostnames.flatten
end

... was not in fact pulling down node[:rackspace][:private_aliases]. It was not setting it from the override_attributes of the roles properly. It was ignoring what I had set with knife node edit. It should have tipped me off that every time I ran chef-client, node[:rackspace][:private_aliases] was getting overwritten. Instead, I focused on the fact that I had compiled ruby with threads enabled, and maybe, just maybe, chef-solr-indexer had corrupted solr or something. (It didn't). I ended up wiping the solr data directory and forced a reindex ... and it still came out the same.

Finally, out of sheer flailing around, I finally saw a detail I had missed in the growing red haze of frustration. The Rackspace server had a "public_ip" attribute set that I had not set at all. Where did that come from? Suspicion blossomed. I ran ohai on the Rackspace Cloud server, and here is the lesson learned:

ohai manages the rackspace namespace if you are on Rackspace Cloud. Don't touch it!

I have no idea whether this had always been there or not, though I did notice a knife rackspace option pop up since 0.8.16. The fact that ohai will automagically detect Rackspace private ip is awesome -- I don't have to use my own version, except when I'm trying to emulate Rackspace. I'll probably split that out into its own recipe, and use the :ghetto_dns namespace for the host aliases instead.

Another action item: I will be more assertive about asking Opscode for a Changelog -- assuming they are not keeping up with it. And assuming that I ever get out of this Chef iteration I'm not supposed to be operating in...

But for those of you itching to develop your own recipes for Rackspace, now you know.