[chef] knife bootstrap Command Not Applying the Run List

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I'm sending this to the mailing list because I have posted a bug on 3/6/2012 and haven't gotten a response. Any help is much appreciated. Here's the ticket:

http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-2962

When running the knife bootstrap command and passing in the -r option to specify the run list, the node installs the chef-client but does not perform a chef-client run and completely ignores the run list. There is also no first-boot.json file present in /etc/chef. We get these results when using the -d option and a distro file to install chef-client from apt packages and we also get these results when not using -d option the chef-client installs through gem. Adding the -VV option gives us no informative error. knife-bootstrap just stops after the chef-client installation. We get this behavior from knife on two different Linux workstations. One in Ubuntu 10.04 Server LTS and the other is Linux Mint 12. Here are the commands that we have used that produce these results:

knife bootstrap uscheflab015 -x root -P ROOTPASSWORD -d ubuntu-wt-apt -r 'role[base]' -N uscheflab015.ourdomain.com -VV --bootstrap-proxy http://proxy.ourdomain.com:8080

knife bootstrap uscheflab015 -x root -P ROOTPASSWORD -r 'role[base]' -N uscheflab015.ourdomain.com -VV --bootstrap-proxy http://proxy.ourdomain.com:8080

Here is the ubuntu-wt-apt distro template we are using. We had to modify it not to include the proxy information in the client.rb file. The knife bootstrap command needs the proxy to get out of our internal network only to download the Opscode repository key via wget, but the node does not need the proxy in order to contact the chef-server on our internal network.

Here is our ubuntu-wt-apt template. It's identical to ubuntu10.04-apt except it doesn't place the proxy info into the client.rb.

http://pastie.org/3677629

I can confirm that this is also happening with the default ubuntu10.04-apt bootstrap template. Here is the command I'm running that still stops short of doing a chef run:

knife bootstrap 10.116.27.100 -x root -N uscheflabext001.field.jw.org --bootstrap-proxy http://proxy.ourproxy.com:8080 -r 'role[base]' -s https://usmgmtext016.field.jw.org -d ubuntu10.04-apt -VV

Also, doing the following (as mentioned in the Knife Bootstrap wiki page) does not resolve the issue as there is no such file /etc/chef/first-boot.json

:~# chef-client -j /etc/chef/first-boot.json
[Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:53:50 -0400] FATAL: I cannot find /etc/chef/first-boot.json

Kind regards,

Ian D. Rossi
CD - Server Infrastructure
Phone 23834