After a recent DNS snafu, it seems that all 6 of my chef clients stopped communicating with my open source chef server. In an effort to correct this, I deleted the clients and nodes in the Chef server Web UI with the intention of creating them again.
So I went into my chef-repo (kept in git) and the subdirectory I created for the host I was attempting to recreate. And deleted the client.rb and validation.pem. Then I ran:
knife configure client ./ and got two fresh files. Which were moved into /etc/chef on that host. Knife (fortunately) was working just fine throughout.
But when I went to run the chef-client command again I started seeing these errors:
:~/chef-repo/logs] #chef-client
[2013-12-18T23:31:13-05:00] INFO: Forking chef instance to converge...
Starting Chef Client, version 11.6.2
[2013-12-18T23:31:13-05:00] INFO: *** Chef 11.6.2 ***
[2013-12-18T23:31:14-05:00] INFO: Client key /etc/chef/client.pem is not present - registering
[2013-12-18T23:31:19-05:00] INFO: HTTP Request Returned 500 Internal Server Error: internal service error
[2013-12-18T23:31:29-05:00] INFO: HTTP Request Returned 500 Internal Server Error: internal service error
[2013-12-18T23:31:59-05:00] INFO: HTTP Request Returned 500 Internal Server Error: internal service error
[2013-12-18T23:33:17-05:00] INFO: HTTP Request Returned 500 Internal Server Error: internal service error
[2013-12-18T23:33:17-05:00] WARN: Failed to register new client, 4 tries remaining
[2013-12-18T23:33:17-05:00] WARN: Response: HTTP 500 - 500 "Internal Server Error"
[2013-12-18T23:33:23-05:00] INFO: HTTP Request Returned 500 Internal Server Error: internal service error
[2013-12-18T23:33:31-05:00] INFO: HTTP Request Returned 500 Internal Server Error: internal service error
[2013-12-18T23:33:58-05:00] INFO: HTTP Request Returned 500 Internal Server Error: internal service error
[2013-12-18T23:35:21-05:00] INFO: HTTP Request Returned 500 Internal Server Error: internal service error
[2013-12-18T23:35:21-05:00] WARN: Failed to register new client, 3 tries remaining
[2013-12-18T23:35:21-05:00] WARN: Response: HTTP 500 - 500 "Internal Server Error"
[2013-12-18T23:35:26-05:00] INFO: HTTP Request Returned 500 Internal Server Error: internal service error
[2013-12-18T23:35:35-05:00] INFO: HTTP Request Returned 500 Internal Server Error: internal service error
I was just hoping for a little guidance on how to get this show back on the road.