There are a number of ways to setup your infrastructure so that you can refer to machines by hostname. I currently prefer the “dynamically generated hosts file” approach because it’s simple to understand and setting up a DNS server is intimidating (as well as a single point of failure).
Shlomo Swidler has a great article comparing different DNS configurations as well as some sample code for dynamically updating hosts files. However, if you’re already using Chef you can achieve the same thing with a very simple cookbook.
First, create a new cookbook:
$ cd chef-repo/ $ rake new_cookbook COOKBOOK=hosts CB_PREFIX=site- |
Place the following in site-cookbooks/hosts/recipes/default.rb:
# Find all nodes, sorting by Chef ID so their # order doesn't change between runs. hosts = search(:node, "*:*", "X_CHEF_id_CHEF_X asc") template "/etc/hosts" do source "hosts.erb" owner "root" group "root" mode 0644 variables( :hosts => hosts, :fqdn => node[:fqdn], :hostname => node[:hostname] ) end |
Then create the template, site-cookbooks/hosts/templates/default/hosts.erb:
127.0.0.1 localhost <% @hosts.keys.sort.each do |fqdn| %> <%= @hosts[fqdn][:ipaddress] %> <%= fqdn %> <%= @hosts[fqdn][:hostname] %> <% end %> # The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts ::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback fe00::0 ip6-localnet ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix ff02::1 ip6-allnodes ff02::2 ip6-allrouters ff02::3 ip6-allhosts |
Add the recipe to your node’s run_list and run chef-client and your /etc/hosts should contain all the Chef nodes on your network. Note that one downside to this approach is that updates will be slow (since chef-client only runs every 30 minutes by default).
Now what if you wanted to point at a specific service, like having chef.example.com point at your Chef master? Just search for it in your recipe (and add it to the variables list):
chef_server = search(:node, 'run_list:recipe\[chef\:\:server\]') |
And add a line to the template:
# Chef master server <%= @chef_server[:ipaddress] %> chef.example.com |
Sure beats setting up a DNS server!