test please delete

[FatLazyContractor]

Urban Dictionary: hot lunch

[SimonMac]

Sodding stackoverflow.com is utterly useless sometimes. "How do I set up x on Windows?" "I use w, y, and z on FreeBSD instead because it's better."

Mind you, all such places are the same. Google led me to a Microsoft support forum yesterday, where somebody having trouble updating PowerShell's help files from inside a corporate network was told to open the firewall

I was surprised they managed to be so polite as they explained that Corporate IT was unlikely to agree to expose thousands of users worldwide to the open Internet just so one person could update a few files

What do you expect when the likes of PC are let lose on those sites!

[mudskipper]

Sodding stackoverflow.com is utterly useless sometimes. "How do I set up x on Windows?" "I use w, y, and z on FreeBSD instead because it's better."

Mind you, all such places are the same. Google led me to a Microsoft support forum yesterday, where somebody having trouble updating PowerShell's help files from inside a corporate network was told to open the firewall

I was surprised they managed to be so polite as they explained that Corporate IT was unlikely to agree to expose thousands of users worldwide to the open Internet just so one person could update a few files

Perhaps you should try experts exchange

[Alias]

Perhaps you should try expert sexchange

I thought he was looking at something else?

[FatLazyContractor]

I thought he was looking at something else?

Mumsnet then !

[mudskipper]

Frozen to the core. Can't seem to warm up. Tea and chocolate not helping.

[NickFitz]

I think I've finally sorted out what's going on.

Chef Server is running on a machine inside the firewall, so shouldn't be accessed via the proxy.

If you want to look at the remote Chef Server (run by Chef), which you need to do to find third-party cookbooks, you need to set the proxy configuration in a Chef config file. But as this is the same config file as used for the local server, you have to comment or uncomment those lines depending on what you want to do at the moment; you can't have it both ways.

To install the third-party cookbooks, you use Berkshelf. But that doesn't use the proxy settings in the Chef config file, and doesn't allow them in its own config file. It only uses environment variables, so you have to set those. But if they're set, Chef won't work properly, either locally or with the remote server. So after running Berkshelf, you have to unset the environment variables again before you can do anything else.

However it doesn't use the user/password environment variables; you have to include those in the proxy URL.

As all this stuff runs on Ruby, you occasionally need to install Ruby libraries, which is done using Gem. Gem also relies on environment variables, but it can't use the proxy URL with the user/password included: they have to be specified in separate environment variables. So you have to re-specify all three to use Gem, then remove two and change one to go back to Berkshelf, and remove all of them to go back to Chef. And vice versa.

It's taken me an entire day and a re-install of everything to finally work all this out, as none of it is documented except for odd comments here and there in bug reports on the various things' GitHub repositories.

[mudskipper]

Yes that did make me chuckle when said person changed it on Facebook

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

[FatLazyContractor]

It's taken me an entire day and a re-install of everything to finally work all this out, as none of it is documented except for odd comments here and there in bug reports on the various things' GitHub repositories.

Now that you figured it all out, can you go home early?!

Or is the reward for good work, more work and all that ... ? ...

[FatLazyContractor]

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Who?