[chef] knife ssh 'name:NODE' 'cmd' != ssh NODE 'cmd' (?)

["Miles, Ken" < >]

Sorry if that subject line doesn't parse real well.

We have a mystery with the 'knife ssh' command when we use it to deploy one 
of our Java based services.  Our recipe for the service concludes with a 
"service ... action :restart".

When we run this knife command:
  knife ssh 'name:FQDN' "sudo chef-client"

We can see our service start, and then it and the Java process stop 
immediately (in < one second).  We are yet to get Java or the service to tell 
us why they are going away, they just vanish.

If we run an equivalent SSH command:
  ssh FQDN "sudo chef-client"

The service starts, and stays started.  Why would this make a difference?  
And is there a way to get Knife to provide us with more information when it 
does the restart?

Our Chef Server and the managed node are on 0.9.8.  I've run the above 
commands from the server and also from a 0.10.0 node with the same results.  
I also get the same results when I run a script calling the Knife libraries 
directly. 

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Ken Miles
DevOps Engineering
Infogroup, PDX