List the installed Windows Features on the Windows server with PowerShell

When you set up a new Windows server and want to make sure all necessary Windows features are installed on it, you can list them in text format. If you want to replicate the configuration of an existing server, just list the features of both servers and compare them in a comparison tool, like Araxis …

Remove Policyfile.rb from your Chef cookbook

When you test your cookbook in Chef Test Kitchen and get the following error, delete the “Policyfile.rb” from your Chef cookbook directory. $$$$$$ You must set your run_list in your policyfile instead of kitchen config. The run_list your config will be ignored. $$$$$$ Ignored run_list: [“recipe[…::…]”] Preparing dna.json Exporting cookbook dependencies from Policyfile /tmp/… Error: Invalid …

Unable to satisfy the following requirements error message in Chef Test Kitchen

When Berkshelf in the Chef Test Kitchen cannot resolve the cookbook dependencies, it displays the following error message during converge: Unable to satisfy the following requirements To help Berks to start a fresh calculation, delete the Berksfile.lock file and enter the following into the command window: berks install

DevOps Engineering part 2. – Create and test your first cookbook in 5 minutes

In the first part of the series, Beginner’s Guide to DevOps Engineering Part 1. we have already installed the DevOps development tools. Create and test your first cookbook in 5 minutes  Set up the Chef working folder Create a folder for the Chef development on Mac ~/Chef on Windows C:\Chef In the Chef folder create a sub-folder …

Beginner’s Guide to DevOps Engineering part 1.

DevOps engineering (Release engineering) is a relatively new profession. There is a very high demand for experienced DevOps engineers, because more and more large corporations want to migrate their data centers into the Cloud. In this series I will introduce you to the tools of the trade through the development of a Chef cookbook. The …

Enable file sharing on Windows servers in Amazon Web Services (AWS)

When you create an EC2 instance in Amazon Web Services (AWS) the security group (firewall) blocks all ports that are not explicitly opened. To make file sharing possible on Windows servers, open the following ports in the security group of the server: TCP 139 TCP 445

How to copy files to the clipboard

When you work in the graphical user interface (GUI) of your operating system, and want to copy the contents of a file to the clipboard, you can use the following commands: On OS X run: cat FILE_NAME | pbcopy On Linux run: cat FILE_NAME | xclip On Windows (via Cygwin/Git Bash) run: cat FILE_NAME | clip

How can I tell if a Chef cookbook is frozen

If a Chef cookbook is “frozen”, the cookbook is protected against accidental overwrite. When someone tries to overwrite it the “Version … of cookbook COOKBOOK_NAME is frozen. Use –force to override” message appears. To check if a Chef cookbook is frozen on the Chef server execute the following command knife cookbook show COOKBOOK_NAME latest | grep …