[CHEF-32139] Fix knife vcenter vm clone hanging/failing during SSH bootstrap

[ashiqueps]

Summary

Fixes knife vcenter vm clone hanging or failing forever with Errno::EADDRNOTAVAIL during the SSH-bootstrap wait phase, even though the cloned VM is genuinely reachable over SSH the entire time. Previously customers had to manually Ctrl-C the clone and re-run knife bootstrap against the already-cloned VM.

Root Cause

knife-cloud's SshBootstrapProtocol#wait_for_server_ready computes the SSH probe port as config[:connection_port] || config[:ssh_port] with no fallback to the standard port 22 (unlike its own ssh_gateway branch a few lines later, which correctly falls back to || 22). When a user doesn't pass --connection-port/--ssh-port on the CLI (the common case), both values are nil, so the code calls TCPSocket.new(hostname, nil), which deterministically raises Errno::EADDRNOTAVAIL on every single attempt, forever — even though the VM is reachable on port 22 the whole time.

Confirmed via live reproduction against a real vCenter lab environment: TCPSocket.new(ip, nil) raises the exact error observed in the failing bootstrap, while TCPSocket.new(ip, 22) against the same VM at the same moment succeeds immediately.

Changes Made

• lib/chef/knife/cloud/ssh_bootstrap_protocol_patch.rb (new) — reopens SshBootstrapProtocol to:
  • Override wait_for_server_ready to add the missing || 22 default (the actual root-cause fix)
  • Rescue Errno::EADDRNOTAVAIL as a transient, retryable error in tcp_test_ssh (same bucket as ECONNREFUSED/ENETUNREACH/EHOSTUNREACH), for genuinely transient local networking errors
  • Add a capped exponential backoff with jitter between probe attempts, reducing connection churn against the target
  • Add throttled diagnostic status output (attempt count, elapsed time, last error) so a wait is visible and explainable instead of a silent wall of dots
• lib/chef/knife/vcenter_vm_clone.rb — requires the patch via the lazy deps block
• lib/support/clone_vm.rb — robustify VM lookup by folder path and bootstrap IP extraction (ignore link-local addresses, bound the wait with a timeout instead of looping forever)
• lib/chef/knife/cloud/vcenter_service.rb, lib/chef/knife/cloud/vcenter_service_helpers.rb — supporting service changes needed for the clone/bootstrap flow

Testing

• ✅ bundle exec rake spec — 30 examples, 0 failures
• ✅ bundle exec rake style — 0 offenses
• ✅ Live end-to-end validation against a real vCenter lab environment: clone → instant SSH-readiness detection (no hang) → SSH connect → chef-client install → first Chef Infra Client run, all completing successfully with zero manual intervention (exit code 0)

Test Scenarios Covered

• Happy path: wait_for_server_ready defaults the probed port to 22 when neither --connection-port nor --ssh-port is configured
• Explicit --connection-port/--ssh-port values still take precedence over the default
• Regression test reproducing the exact TCPSocket.new(host, nil) failure mode this patch prevents
• Transient error handling: EADDRNOTAVAIL, ECONNREFUSED, non-readable timeout, successful SSH banner path
• Backoff growth and cap, diagnostic status throttling