Sometimes you get obscure error messages when running the Chef client and you have a hard time finding any clue about where to look for the error. Is your cookbook broken? Do you have a networking issue? Is your Chef server down? Only by looking at the most verbose log output do you have a chance to find out.
To see how we can ask the Chef client to print debug messages, run the Chef client with debug
output:
user@server:~$ sudo chef-client -l debug ...TRUNCATED OUTPUT... [2016-11-14T07:57:36+00:00] DEBUG: Sleeping for 0 seconds [2016-11-14T07:57:36+00:00] DEBUG: Running Ohai with the following configuration: {:log_location=>#<IO:<STDOUT>>, :log_level=>:debug, ...TRUNCATED OUTPUT... [2016-11-14T07:57:37+00:00] DEBUG: Plugin C: ran 'cc -V -flags' and returned 1 [2016-11-14T07:57:37+00:00] DEBUG: Plugin C 'cc -V -flags' failed. Skipping data. [2016...