Operations grimoire/Salt

Salt is used for deployment. Configuration can be found in the rOPS repository.

Keys

Master

master.pub: 67:8b:e6:b2:7b:73:5b:f1:50:f4:48:38:9a:4c:1c:31:e1:b7:6e:eb:9f:47:98:40:1f:53:29:9e:86:bb:83:38

This fingerprint should be used by minions in the `master_finger` value in configuration file.

It can be updated running salt-call --local key.finger from Complector.

Troubleshoot

Request timeout

Symptoms on master

The minion doesn't reply with job result

Symptoms on minion

When running through salt-call, output shows SaltReqTimeoutError, retrying. (1/7).

Possible cause and solutions

The master key has expired on the minion: remove it on the minion with rm /etc/salt/pki/minion/minion_master.pub. If you can repro faithfully a scenario with this issue, add more details at https://github.com/saltstack/salt/issues/46923

Upgrade considerations

Do hotfixes apply correctly, like in D3392?

Best practices for configuration

UIDs and GIDs should be unique

UIDs and GIDs are created autoincrementally by the OSes, so it's very easy to have two different usernames using the same uid on two machines. To avoid that, every user.present and group.present Salt state should specify the uid explictly. To avoid to reuse one, document it in rOPS: UIDs and rOPS: GIDs.

Enable a service On FreeBSD

A lot of code manually create /etc/rc.conf.d/<service name> and provision it with file.managed.

In D3413, a simpler approach is to let Salt create that file automatically and put <service>_enable="YES" on it.

Decision tree:

• Do we only have one configuration file for that service?
  • Yes -> provision a unique file /etc/rc.conf.d/<service name>
  • No -> provision a first file in the service directory: /etc/rc.conf.d/<service name>/<configuration file>

• Do we have any service configuration in addition to <service>_enable to set in that file?
  • Yes -> provision /etc/rc.conf.d/<service name> through file.managed and a template, e.g. rOPS: roles/prometheus/prometheus/service.sls
  • No -> use service.running with enabled: True, e.g. D3413