title: Chef client re-register breaks ability to save node data back to chef server
body: <p>When I generate new client keys for a host and put them in /etc/chef/client.pem, my chef-client run goes through fine, except the end state is always marked as "Chef Client failed." I believe this is the node data that the node tries to update for itself on the chef-server, and somehow that data requires the old client.pem file.</p>
  
  <p>To give more context:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>My host disk dies and it gets re-imaged. Once the OS is installed, I need to bootstrap it with chef.</li>
  <li>I would rather leave the roles associated with this node untouched. As such, my automation that kicks in after host installation copies over (from a secure server) the validation.pem, a headless_admin.pem and does a rest 'DELETE /clients/clientname'. I do not 'DELETE /nodes/nodename' as I want to preserve roles associated with the nodename.</li>
  <li>Running chef-client now generates a new client.pem file (similar to doing a 'knife client reregister clientname' from a workstation. </li>
  <li>However, though this chef-client run converges as expected, it bails out at the end with a failed state. Enabling debug mode doesn't provide any more info. I strongly suspect this is failing as node tries to update its saved state on the chef server.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Is there a way to enable a client to ignore any changes to the client.pem and update its node state. (without that, the whole concept of re-registering seems pointless).</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for reading through and any insights on this</p>