At thetrainline.com we use Opscode Chef for managing our build infrastructure. Like many other tools running on Windows, the chef-clientohai framework relies on WMI for extracting information about the server machine on which scripts are being run. We found that Windows WMI repository corruption can cause chef-client runs to fail due to missing WMI classes, which causes the node to remain out of policy. The WMI repo can be repaired using winmgmt /salvagerepository, and the WMI errors can be monitored using the WMIDiag script to alert on WMI repository corruption before future chef-client runs. This post details how we detected and fixed the problem, and how to monitor for WMI repository corruption.