Unable to bootstrap windows server

Chef Infra (archive)
1

This topic has probably been discussed at some point but I did not find when looking.

I have Chef development kit installed on my windows 7 admin client and the chef client installed as a service on a server 2008 R2 instance.

I’m trying to bootstrap the server, but it keeps wanting to download the client installation package and fails.

How can I run the bootstrap without downloading the client?

I use:

knife bootstrap
windows winrm --winrm-user administrator --node-name

msiexec /qn /i C:\inst\chef-client-12.4.3-1.windows.msi ADDLOCAL=“ChefClientFeature,ChefServiceFeature,ChefPSModuleFeature”

2

The bootstrap needs chef-client installed to do its job. If you cannot download Chef from the internet because of your network configuration, you can:

  1. Pre-install chef-client on the box, then bootstrap it;
  2. Use the --bootstrap-proxy option to let the bootstrap download chef via a proxy server that can access the internet;
  3. Use the --bootstrap-install-command option to provide a different command to install chef;

HTH

3

Hi,

I’ve preinstalled the client on the server and it is running as a service. Bootstrap is still trying to download, which i don’t want it to do as I want to control the client version installed and not always use the latest.

Is there a parameter to the knife bootstrap to indicate a preinstalled client?

Thanks.

4

I circumnavigated the problem by giving a local folder path as url to option --msi-url

i.e.
knife bootstrap windows winrm --winrm-user --node-name --msi-url “file:///c:/tem
p/chef-client-12.7.2-1-x86.msi”