[chef] WinRM Chicken / Egg

[Angus Buchanan < >]

I'm familiar with the process of setting up WinRM to allow bootstrapping of machines with knife.

However, I'd like to be able to bootstrap machines without having to first log onto the machine and configure WinRM.  That seems kinda pointless - if I'm going to have to log onto the machine to set up a WinRM listener, I might as well just install Chef while I'm at it.  It also doesn't scale at all...

I'm operating mostly in a cloudy world - combination of Rackspace and EC2.  I'm considering using user data on EC2 to run the WinRM setup stuff... I assume Rackspace has an equivalent mechanism.

Is this pretty much the way to go?  What I'd love would be the ability to run a script using my RDP credentials, but so far I've not seen a way to do this.

Am I missing a trick?  I'd really love to be able to run a script which basically connects to the newly created cloud machine, and runs the winrm stuff to set up the ability to run knife over it.  Pipe dream?

Thanks!

-aob