[chef] Facing 401 unauthorized errors intermittently on Windows

[Madhurranjan Mohaan < >]

Hi,

I am trying to get the Windows VMs to run jobs similar to bootstrap. The knife vsphere plugin wasn't quite working. So I have a powershell script that spawns off a VM and uses Customization spec. As part of the customization spec, I run the following command : "C:\opscode\chef\bin\chef-client -j C:\etc\chef\first-boot.json" . As part of my template, I already have chef installed along with the c:\etc\chef containing "client.rb", " validation.pem" and "first-boot.json" .

Problem is that this seems to be working alternatively. Every 2nd time it fails with the 401 Authorized error ( Searched for this error and I can safely say that the various files are right). I have opened the Vmware console a couple of times to see what happens and every time I do that I can see that the chef run succeeds  .  Any suggestions around what I can do to make this more stable?

thanks
Ranjan