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…
Make decisions in your Chef recipe based on the version of the Chef Client
There are times when you have to make a decision in your Chef recipe, based on the version of the Chef Client installed on the node. There are two ways to get the version of the installed Chef Client: Chef::VERSION…
Knife commands
Knife is a ChefDK command line tool to access the Chef server. We use it to upload our cookbooks, environment files, and data bags to the Chef server, and query the server for information on cookbooks and nodes. Get the list of cookbooks used by a…
Test your cookbook in Chef Test Kitchen against multiple versions of the Chef Client
In large environments, during the Chef Client version change, some older servers still run the prior version of the Chef Client, the newly created servers launch with the new version of the Chef Client. It is very important to test your cookbooks with…
Open the system drive of an AWS instance you cannot log into
If you cannot log into an AWS instance and want to inspect files on it, you can detach the volume from the lost instance and attach it to another instance as the secondary drive. Create a new instance Create a new AWS instance and log into it, Make a…
Debugging a Packer build
Packer can configure a server instance and create an image of it. If you need to examine what Packer is doing, you can run Packer in debug mode and RDP into the instance to view files and other settings. Open the firewall In the “builders”…