sysctl2 Cookbook

A cookbook to configure kernel parameters on a system. It supports configuring files in /etc/sysctl.d, and in /etc/sysctl.conf directly (mainly to support RHEL/CentOS 5 & 6).

Requirements

Should support any linux platform, but has been tested successfully on:

• rhel >= 5.0
• centos >= 5.0
• ubuntu >= 12.04
• fedora >= 17.0

Attributes

sysctl2::default

• ['sysctl']['conf_dir']
  
  Type: String
  
  Description: The directory where the config file is located
  
  Default: /etc/sysctl.d

• ['sysctl']['conf_file']
  
  Type: String
  
  Description: The config file name
  
  Default: 999-chef-sysctl.conf

Usage

sysctl2::default

Set attributes in the sysctl/params namespace to configure kernel parameters. Example values:

node.set['sysctl']['params']['kernel.sysrq'] = 0
node.set['sysctl']['params']['net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range'] = '30000 65000'

Then, just include sysctl2 in your node's run_list:

{
  "name":"my_node",
  "run_list": [
    "recipe[sysctl2]"
  ]
}

For platforms that don't support setting parameters via files in the /etc/sysctl.d directory (RHEL/CentOS 6 and lower), setting the sysctl/conf_dir attribute to '/etc' and the sysctl/conf_file attribute to 'sysctl.conf' will allow you to set kernel parameters in the correct/expected location for that platform. Unfortunatly, that also means that you'll need to be aware of kernel parameter changes in other recipies, and be sure to include them in your attribute list, in order to not miss them.

The default sysctl/conf_file attribute value gives us a reasonable chance of being the last config file applied. The files are processed according to their ASCII sort order, so there is still room to add more files to be processed after the recipe default file by naming the config file with leading character prefixes (ex. zzz-last.conf).

License and Authors

Authors: Michael Morris

License: 3-clause BSD