[chef] knife-ec2 instance creation and management.

[James Andrews < >]

Hello,

I am new to Chef and am evaluating it for future use at my company.  Over the 
last week I have found a few useful tutorials to get me going.  One 
in-particular is the EC2 Bootstrap guide which I've used with varied success.

http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/EC2+Bootstrap+Fast+Start+Guide

I have followed the instructions from this and have successfully spun up a 
small ubuntu server using the following options in my knife.rb file

knife[:image]                   = 'ami-70f96e40'
knife[:user]                    = 'ubuntu'
knife[:availability_zone]       = 'us-west-2b'
knife[:region]                  = 'us-west-2'
knife[:aws_access_key_id]       = "secret"
knife[:aws_secret_access_key]   = "secret"
knife[:aws_ssh_key_id]          = "secret"
knife[:identity_file] = "/Users/jandrews/.ssh/secret.pem"
knife[:ssh_user]                = "ubuntu"

Next I create a run list to install the apache2 cookbook since that is the 
web server I am most comfortable with. The run list looks good so I move to 
Step 6 of the tutorial which allows me to execute "chef-client" remotely for 
the node I spun up.  The command it says to use is:

knife ssh name:NODENAME -x ubuntu "sudo chef-client" -a ec2.public_hostname

The "-a ec2.public_hostname" is suppose to tell knife to use the public 
hostname of the server since the FDQN is set to the internal ip address.  The 
problem is that it does not work.  I instead get the following error

"FATAL: 1 node found, but does not have the required attribute to establish 
the connection. Try setting another attribute to open the connection using 
--attribute."

Googling has given me no useful information.  I looked at the node attributes 
via the web browser on opscode.com and notice an ec2 node attributes  with no 
value, and wonder if that's suppose to be a json valued key/pair list.

So it seems either something is broken with knife-ec2 or I am missing 
something minor.  I would really appreciate any insight anyone has on how to 
get this command to work.

Thanks
James