chef / chef/chef

knife ssl check mismatched cert error message is not helpful

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Aspect: UX documentation Focus: knife
Dominant language
Ruby
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Description

I burned a ton of time after hitting this one. It seems like a common getting started error with Chef that we should really handle better. If you spin up a node in EC2 it ends up with the cert being signed by the internal hostname and you can't use that self signed cert with knife. The solution it to update the API URL in the server config and reconfigure, but good luck finding anything online to tell you that. We should expand this error message to point to some sort of help documentation otherwise users are going to just drop off here after they can't get the server and knife to talk w/o turning off SSL verification.

Connecting to host 34.213.52.123:443
ERROR: The SSL cert is signed by a trusted authority but is not valid for the given hostname
ERROR: You are attempting to connect to:   '34.213.52.1233'
ERROR: The server's certificate belongs to 'ip-172-31-25-123.us-west-2.compute.internal'```

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by locating the implementation of knife ssl check and the code that emits the hostname/certificate mismatch errors. Review the related help documentation, then update the error guidance so users can find the server configuration and reconfiguration steps; done means the reported failure points to useful documentation without recommending disabled SSL verification.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
ruby
Domain
cli, devops, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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