Chef bootstrap giving 401 unauthorized

Solution 1:

I just had the same problem and fixed it from this thread http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.chef.user/2718

either ssh into your potential client machine and remove the /etc/chef/client.pem or run this quicky

ssh -t [email protected] "sudo rm /etc/chef/client.pem"

Run knife bootstrap again and it should work. You may have registered this machine already with another chef server.

This worked for me http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Common+Errors#CommonErrors-401Unauthorized(usingvalidatorAPIclient)

You need to delete validation.pem and restart chef-server, since it's broken by default in current ubuntu chef-server package.