Chef Server Sync

This playbook used to sync two running Chef Infra servers. For instance if you want to keep a primary server in sync with a DR one.

Overview

This Ansible play operates by utilizing the knife-ec-backup gem. Information about that can be found here: https://github.com/chef/knife-ec-backup. Below are the steps general steps that this play takes:

The pre_checks role checks all systems to see where in the process the play might have ended previously.
The create_backup role creates a backup of flat files on the Primary Chef server located in /var/opt/chef-backup/, which it then compresses. It also compresses chef_admin’s ~/.chef directory for the PEM files.
The create_restore_account role creates a temporary user named restore on the Secondary Chef server; this is used as the account from which to restore from so that the account isn’t overwritten during the restore. It also creates a temporary ssh key pair between the two Chef servers.
The restore_backup role pushes the archived backups to /var/opt/chef-backup/ on the Secondary Chef server, extracts them, and then runs the restore command.
Finally the cleanup role goes through and removes the backup directories on both servers, deletes the restore user from the Secondary Chef server, and removes the temporary ssh keys from the Primary Chef server.

chef_server_sync.yml

---

- name: Chef Server Sync Playbook
  hosts: "{{ chefsrv_bkup | lower }}"
  vars:
    - time_stamp: "{{ ansible_date_time.epoch }}"
    - ansible_svc_acct: <ansible_account>
    - ansible_svc_acct_home: <ansible_home>
    - chef_org: <chef_org_name>
    - chef_home: <chef_admin_home>
    - chef_user: <chef_admin>
  gather_facts: True
  become_flags: '-i'
  become: True

  pre_tasks:
    - name: Verify if a host is a valid chef server
      fail:
        msg: Host is not an intended chef server.
      when: inventory_hostname is not regex("^(chef|chef-lab).*")

  tasks:

  roles:
    - pre_checks
    - create_backup
    - create_restore_account
    - restore_backup
    - cleanup

...