knife solo fails to prepare Ubuntu ARM Server

Question

Using Knife solo to provision an ARM server with Chef but it silently fails.

• Verify by checking for chef-solo a command that is required for provisioning a system with Chef.

x86 / Succeeding Process - Abridged

Bootstrapping Chef...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 20507  100 20507    0     0  17452      0  0:00:01  0:00:01 --:--:-- 17452
ubuntu 16.04 x86_64
Getting information for chef stable 12.17.44 for ubuntu...
downloading https://omnitruck-direct.chef.io/stable/chef/metadata?v=12.17.44&p=ubuntu&pv=16.04&m=x86_64
  to file /tmp/install.sh.4824/metadata.txt
...
...
Preparing to unpack .../chef_12.17.44-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking chef (12.17.44-1) over (12.17.44-1) ...
Setting up chef (12.17.44-1) ...
Thank you for installing Chef!

ssh root@success
root@success:~# chef-solo -v
Chef: 12.17.44

Arm server / Failing Process

Bootstrapping Chef...
Updating apt caches...
Installing required packages...
Installing rubygems from source...
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100  243k  100  243k    0     0   981k      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  999k

ssh root@failure
root@failure:~# chef-solo -v
-bash: chef-solo: command not found

Answer 1

Knife solo is failing to provision Arm servers. The bug is being tracked for the 0.7.0 release but the release doesn't look imminent

This part of the code handles the chipset Likely that Debian Arm platform fails in a similar manner (untested).