Diffuse Cloud: Chef Server Errors and their Solutions

While working on Chef, I came across multiple errors. After spending lot of time, I was able to find solutions. So, I came up with an idea of this post which is focused on errors related to chef and their solutions.

Error 1 : Error while installing knife ec2 gem

ERROR: Error installing knife-ec2:

ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb

checking for libxml/parser.h… no

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libxml2 is missing. please visit http://nokogiri.org/tutorials/installing_nokogiri.html for help with installing dependencies.

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*** extconf.rb failed ***

Solution :

yum install libxslt libxslt-devel

This command will install all necessary dependencies for knife ec2 gem.

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Error 2 : EDITOR environment variable error

ERROR: RuntimeError: Please set EDITOR environment variable

Solution :

This error can be resolved by issuing command “export EDITOR=$(which vi)”.

But this environment variable will lost on system restart. For persistance, please add this above command to .bashrc or .bash_profile file.

Another alternative solution(suggested by Mohit - check first comment) for this error is by defining editor in knife.rb file.

Add knife[:editor] = ‘`which vim`’ in knife.rb file.

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Error 3 : Error while downloading cookbooks to your local laptop/PC from Chef Server (which is hosted on AWS EC2)

nameless@Nameless:~$ knife cookbook download apache

Downloading apache cookbook version 0.1.0

Downloading resources

Downloading providers

Downloading recipes

ERROR: Network Error: Error connecting to https://ip-10-190-87-80.ec2.internal/bookshelf/organization-00000000000000000000000000000000/checksum-9084de40dd574612517c5c00a2a502bb?AWSAccessKeyId=145e4345cadce32e88d7cd21dfd7808460e15146&Expires=1369139721&Signature=/36/gcGdqdT3EBzDTQv5unEVHdw%3D- getaddrinfo: Name or service not known

Check your knife configuration and network settings

Solution :

We face this error because the s3_url which is set to EC2 private dns address is used by erchef to talk to bookshelf and used to generate URLs that are given to clients that they use to access cookbook content.

To fix this, we need to add :

erchef[‘s3_url’] = https://<AWS-EIP>

to /etc/chef-server/chef-server.rb file. If the file is not present, please create that. Once done, please issue “chef-server-ctl reconfigure” command. [Thanks to Gionn and JB for highlighting this - see comments]

Another solution (Less Suggested) :

PATH : /var/opt/chef-server/erchef/etc/app.config

Modify s3_url from EC2 private dns address to EC2 EIP/Public DNS i.e., modify {s3_url, “https://ip-10-190-87-80.ec2.internal”} to {s3_url, “https://<AWS-EIP>”}.

After that, please perform a system restart. If you issue, chef-server-ctl reconfigure command, it will set s3_url value to original value.

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Error 4 : HTTPServerException : 403 “Forbidden”

FATAL: Net::HTTPServerException: template[/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf] (apache::default line 20) had an error: Net::HTTPServerException: 403 “Forbidden”

Problem: Objects from cookbooks (templates, cookbook_files) are lazily-loaded by default. If it's a very long run, deployment time runs out of time(15 min by default).

Solution : This error is encountered when we have large chef recipes whose deployment time on clients is large than 15 minutes. In order to avoid this error, please increase “s3_url_ttl" value from 900 seconds to required time interval.To increase this value, please add

erchef[‘s3_url_ttl’] = 3600in /etc/chef-server/chef-server.rb file. Once done, please issue “chef-server-ctl reconfigure" command. (Thanks Gionn and JB for highlighting this - see comments).

Another Solution: Don't have access to chef server then:

You can turn off lazy loading on the client by adding

no_lazy_load true

Another Solution (Less Suggested) :

We can find this value in app.config file under path “/var/opt/chef-server/erchef/etc”

After that, please perform a system restart. If you issue, chef-server-ctl reconfigure command, it will set s3_url value to original value.

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Error 5 : RabbitMQ does not start on Oracle or Amazon Linux

RabbitMQ doesn’t start when “chef-server-ctl reconfigure” command issued.

Solution : This error is encountered on Amazon Linux because amazon linux platform is not definited in runit chef recipe for chef server.

To fix this issue, navigate to “/opt/chef-server/embedded/cookbooks/runit/recipes/default.rb” and add below mentioned line after ubuntu platform description :

when "amazon"