why chef-client dies randomly?

Question

We are running knife bootstrap command and most of the time it works fine. Sometimes, we see that chef-client dies. We can see in ps -ef | grep chef*, it returns empty.

Where as in Chef server, I am waiting for few hours and nothing happening. then I want to client machine and I do ps -ef | grep chef* , it is not running.

Chef: 11.12.8 on red hat 6 Linux

How can I know why chef client die?

Answer 1

chef-client doesn't run in the background by default, you have to configure that. Usually with the cookbook also named chef-client . If you do already have it set up as a service, check with your service layer to see why it is exiting (would be Upstart on EL6).