#chef

docwho76: So the problem is likely that changes to environment variables in subprocesses don't affect the parent process (chef in this case)

So you can't check the environment directly

docwho76: Your best bet, if you don't mind throwing more tires on the learning fire, is PS DSC (desired stated configuration) and the https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcen... module

There is an example if you scroll down for how to use that to set the computer name

Quiet in here today

can anybody provide the link of some tutorials on how to migrate all data or servers(conventional) to AWS through chef

?

ponyup: Erm, that isn't something there are tutorials on

ponyup: That's a multi-person-year complex operation involving every discipline of computer technology, not really a candidate for a blog post :)

coderanger:so?

ponyup: Can you be more specific about what you are trying to do?

coderanger:i heard with ec2-knife you can migrate to AWS

is it true

ponyup: knife-ec2 is a very simple CLI tool to launch an EC2 instance and install chef on it, I wouldn't call that a "migration"

docwho76: not_if "$env:computername -like 'yoursesiredname'"

But sure, it could be a part of server migration I suppose, it doesn't do all that much.

coderanger:thanks for the clarification

coderanger: thanks for the link, am aware of DSC but havent had time to look into it too much. stevenmurawski that does exactly what I was looking for. I need to spend some more time reading up on powershell, but work has been cray

docwho76: great. coderanger's suggestion about dsc is a good one. Powershell.org has a free ebook on the topic that's not a long read

Ill check that out

how to automate the stopping of AWS instances so that we can shut down the instances at whatever time we want gracefully ?

ponyup: Automate it in terms of what?

suppose we have 50 instances running in a company on AWS,so we want that every instance should stop on friday evening ,so is there any easy process or scripts to do that?

and in a graceful way not abnormal shutdown

ponyup: Not in Chef, at least not specifically. Would probably want to use a mix of the Autoscaling Group APIs and cron on an executor machine

sounds cool!

in theory you could run a chef provisioning recipe but that seems like an odd use of it

Making it safely time-wise idempotent from recipe code would be really irritating

okay

Also provisioning can only manage machines it created AFAIK

true

ponyup: But again, you are describing very complex infra tasks, not something off-the-shelf tech is going to do for you.

i was asked in an interview this particular question

coderanger

ponyup: Those kinds of questions exist to see how you work through them, there isn't a specific tool or technique that would be the "right answer"

ohhokay coderanger thanks for clarifying me