“Ran out of time waiting for the server with id” with Windows Server 2016 in Chef Test Kitchen
AWS changed how Windows Server EC2 instances send messages during boot. Windows Server 2012 R2 AWS EC2 instances sent the “Windows is ready” message every time those became available after boot. When a Windows Server 2016 AWS EC2 instance…
Test Chef cookbooks locally on a virtual workstation
When you use a virtual machine to write your Chef cookbooks you may want to test them locally with Vagrant. This nested virtual machine cannot use a 64 bit operating system, because to run a 64 bit virtual machine, the host computer’s CPU has to…
Nested VirtualBox virtual machine on a VirtualBox virtual machine
There can be reasons when we want to run a VirtualBox virtual machine on another VirtualBox virtual machine. I am setting up a Windows virtual machine to interview job candidates and want to run a small Ubuntu virtual machine on the Windows virtual…
Resize the VirtualBox image hard drive
When your VirtualBox virtual machine’s hard drive fills up Virtual Box does not provide a user interface to extend it. If you run VirtualBox on a Macintosh workstation Stop the virtual machine On a Macintosh workstation, the virtual machine image…
Ruby tips and tricks
Bang methods (Exclamation point at the end of the method name) There are methods that have a permanent or dangerous version. The exclamation point designates to use the dangerous version of the method. String manipulation The bang versions of the string…
Find the AWS account number
The AWS account number uniquely identifies the AWs account you are working with. All AWS “arn” identifiers contain it, and you need to know it when you want to share AMIs with other accounts. If there are no resources created yet in the…
Execute Terraform scripts with Octopus
Terraform is a very powerful, free command-line tool to launch servers in any cloud or virtual machine environment. Hashicorp, the creator of Terraform just introduced the paid Terraform Enterprise server, that orchestrates the execution of the Terraform…
Migrating from Chef Client version 12 to 13
Chef is under heavy development, every new major version introduces new features, and many times changes, deprecates, or removes some commands or options. Chef Client 13 introduced a new way of handling reboots and Windows scheduled tasks. reboot…
How to upgrade Jenkins
Jenkins regularly releases new versions. To upgrade Jenkins On Linux To install the Generic Java Package (.war) Write down the current version of Jenkins you have on your server Download the Jenkins “Generic Java Package (.war)” file…
Calling a resource in the Chef recipe
During major Chef Client version upgrades, some instructions need to be changed based on the version of the Chef Client. For example, upgrading from version 12 to version 13, the “windows_task” resource requires a different action to make…