Bootstrap a node without internet access

Chef Infra (archive)
1

Hi Team

Is it possible to bootstrap a node without internet access. The normal bootstrap command for windows node looks like this "knife bootstrap windows winrm FQDN -x "Domainname\username -p "Password"
But this leads to
Which means that the node is trying to connect to internet and download this msi.

But I do not want this. I want to download the msi in a different machine, keep it in node server and then run bootstrap. How do I do that?

Thanks

2

Best bet is to have a look at the custom templates for bootstraping, you can copy the base template and change the target uris and the use this custom template to bootstrap your nodes.

The doc is pretty clear IMO, I won’t quote/repeat it here.

3

One of the new-ish options that often overlooked is
’–bootstrap-install-command’
You can simply pass the command with path, for example: “msiexec /i /q
\some_share\chef_client-12.3.0.msi”

You can always yank the command out of the template, edit it as you see
fit, and pass it back in via the --bootstrap… switch.

4

@Alex , Could you please elaborate it little bit. I want to give it a try.

5

knife-windows v1.0.0 or greater (use ChefDK 0.10.0 or greater) includes a --msi-url option which you could use to specify downloading the MSI from an internal server, e.g.

knife bootstrap windows winrm --msi-url http://local_server.example.org/chef-client.msi
3 Likes
6

Thanks btm. Your solution worked.

7

Thanks man, I didn’t see this when I looked at the help initially. This meets my needs perfectly.