I was playing around with Chef Server 12 and attempted to do a knife bootsrap a machine. My bootstrap failed due to a timeout with a remote_file download. I attempted to run a second knife bootstrap against the same machine, and I saw the first-boot.json start doing it’s thing.

About 30 seconds late I saw this error:

Server Response:
----------------
Since Server API v1, all keys must be updated via the keys endpoint.

Needless to say I got frustrated extremely quickly. I wasn’t doing anything due to keys, and now I need to update? :sad_panda: I re-ran the knife bootstrap again, and it bombed out with that same error. Double :sad_panda:

I did some searching around, asked a few people around Chef, and ended up at this blog post.

I did what was suggested in the comments knife client delete <machine> and to be safe knife node delete <machine> and re-ran knife bootstrap. It continued on and bootstrapped the box. I haven’t seen the error since.