There are few ways to backup a Chef server. Opscode has some documenation on their wiki Backing up Chef Server. Some of this is outdated now because chef no longer uses Couch DB.

However there is this little gem (pun intended) called knife-backup.

If you are a frequent reader of this blog you will have seen Hart’s posts about “Cooking with Chef”:

• Part one: Introduction to Chef
• Part two: Cookbooks and Deploying with Knife
• Part three: Installing your own Open Source Chef

Further to these there are also a lot of tutorials on the internet. Most of them seem to focus on using chef to deploy/manage Linux servers but you will have a hard time to find a lot for doing the same on Windows Servers (Yes, Windows as in Microsoft Windows).

I have therefore sat down and put together a detailed step-by-step walkthrough that will guide you through installing your own Open Source Chef Server on a Rackspace Cloud Server running CentOS 6.4, installing the knife-windows plugin and then spinning up, bootstrapping and installing IIS on a Windows Server 2012 Rackspace Cloud Server without logging on to it once. Read on, if you dare…

Maintaining hosts files on standard *nix system has been traditionally done by hand. This becomes a challenge as the number of systems grow and this is more true in the Cloud model where you might add/delete servers at a higher rate. One solution would be to use DNS and use a local zone to store your host name to IP mapping. If you are in the automation using Chef world, here is another example on how to automatically generate the host file entries.