CODEWITHSUNDEEP
chef-infraknife
dharam
dharam

Reputation: 8096

Knife command failing to authenticate

I have created a setup as below, and for all this I am using Amazon EC2:

An ubuntu server 12.04 ion which I have a Chef server installed and knife configured. This is working perfectly fine, I am able to run the knife commands and it is giving me expected results.

Another similar ubuntu server I am trying to use it as a chef client. Installed chef and configured the client. Also, installed knife on the client. I know this is installed properly because after installation I ran the command 

knife --version

I got the output 

Chef: 10.16.2

Now I have configured the knife.rb file. The contents are as follows: log_level :info log_location STDOUT node_name 'knife' cache_type 'BasicFile' cache_options( :path => "~/.chef/checksums" ) client_key '~/.chef/clientkey.pem'

cookbook_path       [ "~/mychefrepo/cookbooks" ]
cookbook_copyright "example org"
cookbook_email     "[email protected]"
cookbook_license   "apachev2"

chef_server_url    "http://ip-11-213-23-99:4000"

validation_key      "~/.chef/validation.pem"

After the configuration If I run the knife command 

knife client list

I get the following error:

ERROR: Failed to authenticate to http://ip-11-213-23-99:4000 as client1 with key /etc/chef/clientkeys.pem

I would request you to please clear my following doubts:

  1. Is it mandatory to keep the clientkey.pem on the chef server too? If yes then at what location?
  2. Is there any specific location where I need to keep the pem file on chef client?
  3. What am I doing wrong?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 7739

Answers (2)

Jyoti Amage
Jyoti Amage

Reputation: 334

When you bootstrap the client from server it creates client.pem there. or even when you run chef-client on client itself it creates client.pem. This file you need to copy on server node. Again you have to provide the path into knife.rb which available in /chef-repo/.chef

  1. Yes it is neccassary to copy it.
  2. Anywhere on server node but oly thing is that you have to provide that location in knife.rb

Upvotes: 0

PatrickWalker
PatrickWalker

Reputation: 550

Your client exists on the chef-server appropriately? I believe it will be called 'knife' as this is your node_name.

http://ip-11-213-23-99:4040/clients

The client pem key does get registered with the server as you can see via the server-webui by going to the clients tab on the server. The key is stored in CouchDB. This value gets here when you perform a chef-client run with the server.

The value of the supplied pem key has to match the stored pem shown in the client view for the 'node_name' you supplied. Is that the case?

The client key itself can be stored anywhere.

Upvotes: 1

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