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

[Jesse Campbell < >]

I used to get that periodically on my chef 10.16 and 10.18 servers, but haven't seen it at all in chef 11... have you considered upgrading just the server? (i'm guessing there's another reason you're waiting to upgrade the clients).

On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 9:26 PM, < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

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