Happy Thanksgiving. Keeping with the food theme....

I have been spending my vacation messing around with Opscode #Chef, #Bento, #Packer, #Berkshelf, #Foodcritic, #Vagrant, #Virtualbox and #Veewee. As a beginning Rubyist and being new to Chef, the learning curve is quite steep. While I should be spending my time with my Linux courses from www.linuxacademy.com, I have deadlines to meet with automated builds and configuration management.

Most of what I am creating is for Windows OSes. As there are not really any books written for Chef for windows, I am using what I know from doing all this on Altiris. By doing this, I have cookbooks that will install default configuration for both W2k8r2 and w2012 along with RDS for both. I have put my Citrix Optimization file into a cookbook. I even have cookbooks that will install, but not configure XD7. While these work well, they are primitive based on good development standards.

Thanks to Alex Vinyar from Opscoode for the code to allow pending reboots!!!!

While messing with Berkshelf last night and today, there is a great article by Jamie Winsor (jamie@vialstudios.com), authoring cookbooks that really opened my eyes at the stuff I need to do with my cookbooks and recipes...

That is what I will be doing the rest of my vacation, making my code less primitive or maybe take a break and study some linux...I might do both...

I also need to figure out have to configure berkshelf to use my different organizations on Hosted Chef. I assume just berks configure and modify the chef settings along changing the berkshelf location for each repo... more testing to really understand it all...

Been with out TV since Friday....something wrong with my Directv dish, so what to do

So earlier I finished some training (posted about that earlier). Bought some new training, watched about 10% of the first one. My Macbook Pro was running slow, so I decided to rebuild it. The cool thing is I didn't have to reinstall Mountain Lion, my recovery partition updated to Mavericks, so now running a clean build of Mavericks.. Runs so much better.

First thing first, Firefox, then Lastpass and finally xmarks. Then it was on to Xcode and the command line tools. Homebrew was next. then onto my developement with Ruby, iTerm2, Sublime Text 2, Chef, Git, knife-windows, knife-cloudstack, knife-xenserver, Vagrant, Virtual box, Berkshelf, & Foodcritic. Then i cloned my my 2 chef repos and tested back in business.

Then it was onto all my other software. Took about 5 hours to get it all nice and functional.

Been going over all the stuff on the new training courses on both CentOS and Ubuntu.

Really missed watching Football today and hat to miss the upcoming 'Walking Dead' episode,  but it will be On-Demand once DirecTV gets here tomorrow to fix this annoying 771 error.