The recent release of an x509 security provider for MCollective has motivated me to do some more work on the mcollective cookbook. Although it worked well enough to play around with, the configuration was not especially flexible and the cookbook did not lend itself to wrapping.

MCollective 1.2 was the current release when I originally wrote the cookbook, and the configuration reflected that. New features introduced in later releases of MCollective weren’t enabled – it worked, but not at its best. The configuration defaults now reflect MCollective 2.2.

Configuration is almost entirely parameterised. If you have need to override the cookbook’s templates to implement your configuration, I’d like to improve this further.

The MCollective “identity” is now configurable via an attribute, but continues to default to node['fqdn']. When your node name and your identity match, you can use the chef-server discovery plugin – so this default may change in the next major release.

Version 0.11.0 of the cookbook is now available on the community site and on Github. If you find it doesn’t do what you need, or you have suggestions to improve it, please open issues on github.