[chef] Re: Knife

[Bryan McLellan < >]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Brian Jakovich 
<
 >
 wrote:
> I don't host my svn repo on Github so I don't have a RSA private key....

Chef uses RSA keypairs to authenticate clients. Running 'knife
configure -i' uses existing keypairs in /etc/chef created during
server startup to authenticate to create an additional client, in your
case named 'knife'. The private key is then saved to disk and the
public key stored on the server.

>> $ knife client list
>>
>> ERROR: Chef::Exceptions::InvalidPrivateKey: The file
>> /home/knife/.chef/knife.pem does not contain a correctly formatted private
>> key.
>> The key file should begin with '-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----' and end
>> with '-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----'

Is there any chance you ran this command more than once? Have you
looked in /home/knife/.chef/knife.pem? Does it contain "nil"? There is
a bug [1] where if a client already exists with that name, knife
overwrites the pem file with "nil". If this is the case, create a new
client with a different name and then use 'knife client delete knife'
to delete the broken and unused one.

[1] http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-2344