I want to disable chef-client run instead of stopping chef-client service or removing cron job schedule which means chef-client will never run again unless run manually.
Coming from puppet background, I am looking for an alternative like "puppet agent --disable" which will keep the chef-client service/cron running but it will not alter any resource.
It is more likely forcing every chef-client run into --why-run mode. Very useful while during upgrades or application deployment. It will allow to make revision/version change in chef role/recipe and apply in set of nodes, otherwise chef-client service or cron has to stop/disable first and re-enabled later which is not a right approach.
I do not see any such option in chef-client binary.
Chef Server and Client version - 11.8.2.
-thanks
4 Answers
which is not a right approach.
Why would you say that? Stopping and starting a service was designed exactly for these kind of situations. Simply use (depending on your preferred way of managing services) service stop chef-client and then run service start chef-client again once you are ready to resume operations.
We use this very regularly, when we want to mess with some configurations on a server before applying them to the Chef scripts. This makes sure Chef doesn't run during our messing around and reverts our manual changes.
4sudo systemctl stop chef-clientworked for me on RHEL 7.5 64-bit
/etc/init.d/chef-client stopworked for me on CentOS release 6.6 (Final) running 2.6.32-504.16.2.el6.x86_64 kernel
Reasons for wanting something like this -- and I'm thinking of Puppet too -- include:
Wanting to test something on a system for an extended time without Chef clobbering it. Lab / virtual test systems don't always suffice.
Not having to trouble 24/7 staff with an alert because I stopped the service on a specific system
Looking for some semaphore file in /var/chef would be trivial to implement.
