Book Image

Managing Windows Servers with Chef

By : John Ewart
Book Image

Managing Windows Servers with Chef

By: John Ewart

Overview of this book

<p>This book begins with an introduction to the functionality and benefits of using Chef to manage Windows systems. From there, you are shown an overview of the Chef architecture and how to prepare a Windows host so that it can be managed by Chef, followed by an example of writing code to install a popular .NET application with Chef.<br /><br />This book looks at how Windows system administrators can effectively leverage Chef as an automated system management tool to simplify their lives through managed infrastructure. Included are practical examples that will help you to understand how to take advantage of Chef when managing your infrastructure.<br /><br />By the end of the book, you will be able to deploy software, provision hosts (including cloud servers), develop and test recipes for multiple platforms, and manage Windows hosts using the powerful tools that Chef provides.</p>
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Manipulating printers


Chef provides two different resources for managing printers—ports and printers themselves. The windows_printer_port resource allows you to install TCP/IP printer ports on a Windows host to connect a printer to. The windows_printer resource is responsible for an actual printer installation, and they are both used in conjunction with one another.

Tip

The printer resources depend on PowerShell to make certain that recipe[powershell] is included on the node's expanded run list to ensure the powershell cookbook is downloaded to avoid circular dependencies.

Managing printer ports

With the windows_printer_port resource, you can create and delete TCP/IPv4 printer ports. This resource is useful for creating printer ports with specific settings when you need control over the port configuration. The windows_printer resource uses the windows_printer_port resource to dynamically create printer ports as needed, so this typically comes in handy only if the default settings are insufficient...