[chef] client problems with 10.20.0 and 11.2.0

[Chris < >]

Hi chefs

an interesting problem has cropped up and i'm a bit stumped. The error
is here: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/4771363. This apparently
has started happening in the last week, but I know there have been
hosts that were newly built with 10.20.0 and are working fine.
As a test for this host that i'm working on, i removed 10.20.0 and its
dependent gems and installed 10.12.0 and the client ran as expected
(ie: new client registration and adding an item to the run_list). I
then reinstalled 10.20.0 on top of 10.12.0 and ran right back into
this wall.  I can't help but think there's something wrong with this
VM and it just needs to be rebuilt, but i'd like to make sure this
isnt a client bug first.

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