Install And Use SALTStack In A Mixed Environment

What is Salt Stack?

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more...

The main porpuse of this document is not just install SaltStack, because it is well documented elsewhere, but rather give you a slight insight of its usability.

The SALT based infrastucture must have a Salt Master, which controls the Salt Minions machines. By Salt Master, you can easily distribute commands directly to Minions as it would be console commands. You can start/stop services, deploy/undeploy packages, manage configurations, etc

Prerequisites

I created a KVM virtual environment in Fedora, based on Falko's document.

Based on Falko's Virtualization howto, I have installed four KVM based virtual machines. I created three base Debian install 7.1 install. One for Salt master and two in order to be Salt minions. I created a CentOS minimal install to be a minion in order to represent mixed environment.

During my work I feel myself confortable to become constantly ROOT user. (Not just keep using sudo by each command)

However I installed VIM and SCREEN for comfortable work environment as well

root@salt-master:/etc/apt# apt-get install screen vim

[root@salt-centos ~]# yum install screen vim

Set up SALT STACK reposotory for Debian

Creating a file for salt repository to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/salt_repo.list

You can just Copy + Paste as I usually do:

echo "deb http://debian.saltstack.com/debian wheezy-saltstack main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/salt_repo.list

wget -q -O- "http://debian.saltstack.com/debian-salt-team-joehealy.gpg.key" | apt-key add -

apt-get update

Set up SALT STACK reposotory for CentOS

Enable EPEL:

rpm -Uvh http://ftp.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

INSTALL SALT STACK

In case you have any firewall between Salt-master and its minions, open the listens on ports 4505 and 4506

INSTALL MASTER on Debian:

apt-get install salt-master -y

INSTALL MINION(S) on Debian:

There are several way seting up minions to find salt-master.

I think, the easiest one is to make an entry on each minions in /etc/hosts which directed to its master.

In my case is:

echo "192.168.122.50 salt" >> /etc/hosts

and..

apt-get install salt-minion -y

INSTALL MINION(S) on Centos:

There are several way seting up minions to find salt-master.

I think, the easiest one is to make an entry on each minions in /etc/hosts which directed to its master.

In my case is:

echo "192.168.122.50 salt" >> /etc/hosts

after it install and start salt components..

yum install salt-minion

chkconfig salt-minion on

service salt-minion start

Authorize minions ON MASTER:

NOW, Minions try authorize itself by key on Salt-master.

On Salt-master, you can see minion:

salt-key -L

This time, you have to see:

root@salt-master:~# salt-key -L
Accepted Keys:
Unaccepted Keys:
salt-centos
salt-minion1.test.local
salt-minion2.test.local
Rejected Keys:

You can authorize them:

salt-key -A

And you will see a result like this:

root@salt-master:~# salt-key -A
The following keys are going to be accepted:
Unaccepted Keys:
salt-centos
salt-minion1.test.local
salt-minion2.test.local
Proceed? [n/Y] y       
Key for minion salt-centos accepted.
Key for minion salt-minion1.test.local accepted.
Key for minion salt-minion2.test.local accepted.

You can see the accepted minions by:

root@salt-master:~# salt-key -L
Accepted Keys:
salt-centos
salt-minion1.test.local
salt-minion2.test.local
Unaccepted Keys:
Rejected Keys:

At this time, you have a salt managed system. You can test it by:

salt '*' test.ping

root@salt-master:~# salt '*' test.ping
salt-minion1.test.local:
    True
salt-minion2.test.local:
    True
salt-centos:
    True

The installation well done, let's see how we can use it.