Sitting with Seth from Opscode today drinking some coffee. He pointed out a couple of things, I’d like to share.
1. Learn how to use Shef, to inspect node. It replaces ‘debug’ statements when doing runs in templates or recipes.
'shef -z'
2. If using Kinfe and a node is acting funny, inspect it via show or edit. For example, you might have to manually edit a run list or a default set of attributes that are an array instead of a hash (both real examples).
3. Stop using symbols for hash keys in recipes, cookbooks, etc. The Opscode default will be a double quoted string and older versions can just not work.
4. Upgrade to latest chef when overrides are not behaving as desired correctly OR override all the attributes for a recipe (even one’s you don’t want to override) if you are < 0.9.10. However, the latter solution is obviously less desirable.
That’s all for now.
