Building the couchdb server

Note: These notes are old. Please see Production Server Setup

• Start by choosing "Deploy a linux distribution" on the linode management dashboard
• options...
  • Distribution: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
  • Deployment Disk Size: 8000 MB
  • Swap Disk: 256MB
  • Root password:
• login with the root account: ssh root@the.ip.address
• add an 'admin' account, which we'll use: adduser admin
  • just leave remaining options blank
• add our new admin use to the sudo group: usermod -a -G sudo admin
• log off the root accout: exit
• ssh back with the admin account: ssh admin@the.ip.address
• now we need to use sudo for most commands, but that's the point
• install ruby, rubygems and some stuff for chef: sudo apt-get install rubygems1.8 ruby1.8-dev libopenssl-ruby
• upgrade ruby gems, which will take a couple commands:
  • sudo gem install rubygems-update
  • sudo /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/update_rubygems
• speed up gem by not building doco:
  • echo gem: --no-ri --no-rdoc > ~/.gemrc
• install a compiler: sudo apt-get install build-essential
• install chef: sudo gem install chef
• create a directory to put chef config in: sudo mkdir /etc/chef
• now FROM YOUR COMPUTER copy the client-configs up to the server:
  • scp rapid_ftr_chef/client-config/client.rb root@li242-160.members.linode.com:/etc/chef/client.rb
  • scp rapid_ftr_chef/client-config/validation.pem root@li242-160.members.linode.com:/etc/chef/validation.pem
• run chef!: sudo chef-client
  • this is expected to get a couple of warnings:

admin@li242-160:~$ sudo chef-client
[Wed, 05 Jan 2011 01:37:03 +0000] INFO: Client key /etc/chef/client.pem is not present - registering
[Wed, 05 Jan 2011 01:37:07 +0000] WARN: HTTP Request Returned 404 Not Found: Cannot load node li242-160.members.linode.com
[Wed, 05 Jan 2011 01:37:09 +0000] INFO: Starting Chef Run (Version 0.9.12)
[Wed, 05 Jan 2011 01:37:10 +0000] WARN: Node li242-160.members.linode.com has an empty run list.
[Wed, 05 Jan 2011 01:37:10 +0000] INFO: Chef Run complete in 0.608504 seconds
[Wed, 05 Jan 2011 01:37:10 +0000] INFO: cleaning the checksum cache
[Wed, 05 Jan 2011 01:37:10 +0000] INFO: Running report handlers
[Wed, 05 Jan 2011 01:37:10 +0000] INFO: Report handlers complete

Now you can add recipes to the run_list on the opscode dashboard: