Installing client on Windows without bootstrapping

Chef Infra (archive)
1

Hi everyone. Apologies if this has been asked before, I did look, honest!!

In the environment I’m working in the likes of winrm and ssh are blocked, so I cannot do a normal knife bootstrap to install these nodes.

Is there a way to get the chef-client installed and a node onto the chef server without the bootstrapping method? In a perfect world just by pulling https files from the server, possibly with the pre-shared validation pems.

2

I’m very new to this, so don’t take this as particularly insightful, but I was able to connect a node ‘locally’ without using WinRM by

Installing the msi
copying across the organisation validator .pem
building a simple knife.rb file,

  • log_level :info
  • log_location STDOUT
  • node_name ‘THIS_NODE001’
  • client_key ‘C:\chef\client.pem’
  • chef_server_url ‘https://myserver.my.org/organizations/myorg’
  • validation_key ‘C:\chef\myorg-validator.pem’
  • validation_client_name ‘myorg-validator’

running chef-client, which creates the client.pem and registers the node

Having got that far, I expect the thing to do would be to use the chef client cookbook to tidy up, standardise and get the client properly set up

Hope that helps

1 Like
3

Thanks! I’ll give it a shot and see what happens on a test box.