Vagrant: “The following SSH command responded with a non-zero exit status. “

Vagrant up often returns the following error running Chef scripts:

The following SSH command responded with a non-zero exit status.
Vagrant assumes that this means the command failed!

mount -t vboxsf -o uid=`id -u vagrant`,gid=`id -g vagrant` v-csc-1 /tmp/vagrant-chef-1/chef-solo-1/cookbooks

You can troubleshoot this by logging into the running server, then running the command (the password is usually vagrant):

ssh vagrant@localhost -p 2222 

Often this failure is an indication that Vagrantfile points to an invalid path on the host machine (not the virtualized environment). This can be verified by running the above command, but change the mount point, like so:

mount -t vboxsf -o uid=`id -u vagrant`,gid=`id -g vagrant` v-csc-1 /tmp/vagrant-chef-1/chef-solo-2/cookbooks

If this returns “Protocol error”, it is likely a bad path.