It’s been a busy day, I haven’t posted anything since July and today three posts!

Well in Part 1 we talked about what Desired State Configuration was, in Part 2 I showed you how to manually setup the pull server. Now I’ll show you how to get your target node to pull configurations from the pull server. This is basically tying the loose ends together. I don’t anticipate adding any additional posts around this particular series as it really just fills a need for me. Detailed steps on how to get from point A to point B.

So in order for the client to talk to the server we need a GUID. This GUID will represent this client, if you have several clients it may be worthwhile noting these down, along with the name and or IP of the client. Honestly, the best way to make these things is in PowerShell, it’s a one-liner.

[System.Guid]::NewGuid()

Guid
----
6e4bc22c-1ea3-4be6-b6a9-5694f0cfcaf8

Now that our pull server is up and running, we’ll need to modify our Configuration, and really all that needs to be changed is where we specify ComputerName. This time around our command looks like this

BasicWebServer -ComputerName “6e4bc22c-1ea3-4be6-b6a9-5694f0cfcaf8” Note we passed in the GUID we just created, this is important as it will update the MOF we have locally stored with the GUID instead. If we look inside our .\BasicWebServer folder you will see a new MOF file with the GUID as the name. Now we need to create our checksum file.

New-DSCCheckSum -ConfigurationPath .\BasicWebServer -OutPath .\BasicWebServer

This result of this cmdlet is a .checksum file that is the same name as the MOF file that we just created. These two files are then copied to the pull server’s configuration directory. Once these have been copied over we can run the Configuration that configures the Local Configuration Manager.

This is run like you would run any other configuration EXCEPT, you must specify the GUID we just created, as well as the URL to the pull-server. In Part 2, our URL was not a virtual directory so we can just pass in the name of the server. If you created a virtual directory, you will need to pass in the full URL.

This particular configuration TURNS OFF SSL. I put that in caps because I think it’s important to note that DSC defaults to working over SSL only.

SetupDSCClient -NodeId "6e4bc22c-1ea3-4be6-b6a9-5694f0cfcaf8" -PullServer "webserver01"

Now, every 30 minutes your client will communicate with your pull-server and make sure that all the basic web server features are available. You should remove all those features and test it out.

I had some trial and tribulation when I was first setting this up, my first obstacle was my server was 2012, so I had to install WMF 4.0. Then I needed to change my configuration to run unsecure since I didn’t want to mess with certs. Finally since there were other web sites running on the server I needed to change to a different port.