Salt

salt, or saltstack, is a provisioning system like puppet or chef. It's the provisions system PS:One Systems Group uses to manage and maintain the servers.

Adding a new box

When you install salt-minion on a client box, you will need to

   sudo salt-key -L
   sudo salt-key -a foobox
   sudo salt 'foobox' state.highstate

Changeing salt config

• Make your changes in /srv/salt/

Test your changes

Test your changes. Testing against a single box is wiser than testing against the entire network

   sudo salt 'sally.ad.pumpingstationone.org' state.highstate test=True

If you are satisfied, run the command for real

   sudo salt 'sally.ad.pumpingstationone.org' state.highstate

reboot the box and make sure it still comes back up and works correctly.

Deploying changes

   sudo salt --state-output=mixed '*' state.highstate test=True

   sudo salt '*' state.highstate

Upgrading Everything

test the upgrade against a single box

sudo salt 'sally.ad.pumpingstationone.org' pkg.upgrade
sudo salt 'sally.ad.pumpingstationone.org' cmd.run 'reboot'

After rebooting the test box, log back in and make sure everything appears to work correctly. Once you are satisfied you are not going to have a long night repairing the network, deploy upgrades everywhere.

sudo salt '*' pkg.upgrade

Adding someone's SSH key to root access

1. Get an SSH key. Here are some simple instructions:

• Linux
• Windows

It would be nice if this was better documented.