I wanted to start an occasional series of very short posts addressing some specific methodological or practical issue, to share knowledge which I hadn't found widely publicised. Longer than a Twitter post, shorter than a blog entry, I'll call them "twogs" (though "blitters" would be another possibility).
So: I was testing a number of cookbooks with kitchen. The.NET 4.6.1 framework install consistently failed with a 16389 return code. Since this was a new recipe, I suspected I was passing the wrong flags somewhere -- a view substantiated by.
Unfortunately, this didn't resolve matters, and neither did the suggestion to extract and repackage the.NET framework redistributable. And as for the 16389 code -- it's one I hadn't previously encountered.
And then by chance I found the solution to the problem here.
Until 1.8.0, test-kitchen's winrm transport didn't support elevation, and it was this that was causing the issue. The Chef team even acknowledged that this addressed the very problem I'd been encountering with the.NET framework install, but there doesn't seem to be much visibility of either the problem or its solution -- as noted here and then here to get the kitchen winrm transport documentation updated.
In summary, here's what you need to do:
1. Install test-kitchen 1.8.0 or above
2. Ensure you have the winrm-elevated gem installed (chef gem install winrm-elevated)
3. Add an "elevated: true" to your winrm transport provider in your.kitchen.yml file