[chef] occasionally client fails with 404 when copying a file

hi all,

i'm often plagued by a chef client run failing due to it getting a 404 on a 
file
it was trying to copy into place as declared in a recipe. is this known?

here's how it goes down:

1) i update file like 
site-cookbooks/foo/files/default/usr/local/bin/my-cool-tool.
2) some linux host kicks off its chef client run, which includes a recipe that
   calls remote_directory to copy the contents of 
site-cookbooks/foo/files/default/usr/local/bin/
   to the local filesystem
3) i run "knife cookbook upload foo" just after the above client has kicked 
off
   its run
4) the chef client run fails because when it tries to copy the file 
   site-cookbooks/foo/files/default/usr/local/bin/my-cool-tool it gets a 404
   for it. if i run chef client again right after this, it succeeds.

i can repro it pretty consistently. is this known? a known bug? is there a 
known workaround? today, in one of the many places in my recipes where i copy
a file, where this 404 problem occasionally plagues us, i put "retries 3" into
the resource block. i'm betting that'll help, but i'm hoping there's a better
fix or work around. if there's not, i'll have to add retries in a lot of 
places.

chef client details: 10.24, Amazon Linux 2012.09 (RHEL6-based)
chef server details: 10.18, Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS

thanks!
kallen