Troubleshooting An Initial Run Chef Client

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Problem scenario
When you are configuring a server to be a Chef client, you run this command:

/usr/bin/chef-client

But you get this error:

“Chef encountered an error attempting to create the client <hostnameOfChefClientServer>”

Solution

Verify you have a client.pem file in this directory on the server you are running the command on: /etc/chef/

The Chef documentation says this:
“Every request made by the chef-client to the Chef server must be an authenticated request using the Chef server API and a private key.

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Infrastructure as Code and Architecting Server Environments for Automatic Replication

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Infrastructure as Code is often associated with “Continuous Configuration Automation.”  We think the term should be “Continual Configuration Automation.”

There are four popular tools to rapidly provision cloud infrastructure using templates: Azure Resource Manager, CloudFormation, Terraform, and Heat.  Three of these tools each support two different types of template files for provisioning servers.

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How Do You Redirect The Output of Lynx to a Regular File?

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Problem scenario:  You are using Lynx and you want to redirect the downloaded web page to a file.  You do not want it to be sent to standard out (also referred to as printed to the screen).  What do you do?

Solution

You should use the “-dump” flag between the “lynx” utility word and the URL.  Then use the regular POSIX redirect symbol “>” at the end of the Linux command. 

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How Do You Get Lynx (in Linux) to Automatically Accept Cookies?

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Problem scenario
You are using Lynx, and the prompt to accept cookies is tedious or disruptive to a non-interactive process you want to develop.  How do you get Lynx (running on Linux) to automatically accept cookies?

Answer
To configure Lynx to always accept cookies, do these steps:

1.  Find lynx.cfg with this command:  find / -name lynx.cfg

2.

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A List of Books Related to Puppet (configuration management software)

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Here is an alphabetized list of Puppet books. 

Beginning Puppet by Spencer Krum, William Van Hevelingen, Daniele Sluijters
DevOps: Puppet, Docker, and Kubernetes by Packt Publishing
Extending Puppet by Alessandro Franceschi
Instant Puppet 3 Starter by Jo Rhett
Learning MCollective: Parallel Server Management in Puppet and Chef by Jo Rhett
Learning Puppet by Bill Ward
Learning Puppet 2nd Edition by Jussi Heinonen
Learning Puppet 4: A Guide to Configuration Management and Automation by Jo Rhett
Learning Puppet for Windows Server by Fuat Ulugay
Learning Puppet Security by Jason Slagle
Mastering Puppet by Thomas Uphill
Mastering Puppet 5: Optimize enterprise-grade environment performance with Puppet by Packt Publishing
Pro Puppet 2nd Edition by Spencer Krum,

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A Long List of Docker Books

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We found Docker Cookbook to be a good reference book about Docker.  The author, via O’Reilly Customer Service, responded to us saying that on page 79 near the top of Figure 3-1, the open curly brace “{” should be removed.  We were impressed the author took that the time to respond.

A shorter book written by two authors (neither of whom authored the Docker Cookbook) is called 

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How Do You Find Logs on a Linux Server That Pertain to a Failed mount Command?

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Problem scenario
You want to set up a file share through Oracle VirtualBox.  You are trying to mount a file share on a Linux guest running via Oracle VirtualBox on a Windows host.   The mount command fails and you want to find relevant logs.  What do you do?

Solution
To find logs that are appropriate to debugging a mount command that does not work,

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How Do You Know If Guest Additions Have Been Installed on Your Linux Guest Running Via Oracle VirtualBox on a Windows Host?

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Question:  How do you find out if Guest Additions have been installed on your Linux guest running via Oracle VirtualBox on a Windows host?

Background  We find this message to be ignorable when installing Guest Additions:  “Could not find the X.org or XFree86 Window System, skipping.”

Answer
Go into the Linux guest and run this command:

lsmod | grep -i vbox

You should see results related to vbox. 

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Two AWS Servers Cannot Ping Each Other. What Is Wrong?

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Problem scenario:  You have two AWS instances in the same security group.  The Security Group has rules for “All TCP” associated with both the public IP address (visible in the EC2 portion of the AWS Console) and the private IP address (found when you issue an “ifconfig” at the OS level of the server).  You find that the servers cannot ping each other.  You cannot SSH from one to the other either.

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