Enforcing security policy is tough, especially in a Windows environment where you are NOT using Group Policy. Think about usage patterns for Windows server on cloud. GPO certainly doesn’t always apply.
The Chef DK includes a tool called Knife. This is primarily used for interaction with remote resources in Chef, such as the Chef Server and Chef managed nodes, but can be used for managing other remote systems too.
Using knife to bootstrap a node to be managed with Chef is a fundamental part of the Chef workflow, especially for dev and test purposes. When you bootstrap a node you are preparing the node to communicate with the Chef Server so it can download the cookbooks and recipes you have defined in its run-list, and eventually match the state you have defined in your Chef code.
Recently I was lucky enough to take part in a ‘hackathon’ with Chef, Microsoft and a partner company based in Norway. It was a great week working with some amazing people!
Posh Git is a really helpful open-source project that includes a number of scripts offering Git and Powershell integration. When installed it allows tab auto completion for common Git operations along with showing the current branch and state of files.
Cloning a hard drive is an especially useful thing to do if you wish to replace your existing hard drive. I recently did this and upgraded from my 7.2K 1TB Western Digital drive to a 120GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD (it was absolutely worth it by the way!