Had a play with SaltStack↗ today, it’s a good way to manage multiple machines from a central location. It runs as a Server (master) and client (minion).

First we need to install the Salt-Master, this assumes you are installing on CentOS and don’t mind having EPEL installed on both the master and minion ….

SaltStack on CentOS 6.x 1/3
# Install EPEL and Update on both the master and minions
yum update -y
yum install http://ftp.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm


# Install the salt-master
yum install salt-master
chkconfig salt-master on
sed -i ‘s/#interface: 0.0.0.0/interface: 0.0.0.0/g’ /etc/salt/master
service salt-master start


# Install the salt-minion
# Replace $salt-master.yourdomain.com with the FQDN of your salt-master


yum install salt-minion
chkconfig salt-minion on
sed -i ‘s/#master: salt/master: manager.yourdomain.com/g’ /etc/salt/minion
service salt-minion start

Now we have a minion talking to the master we need to accept the certificate;

SaltStack on CentOS 6.x 2/3
salt-key -L
salt-key -A [hostname]

Thats it, you can now run commands across all your machines e.g.

SaltStack on CentOS 6.x 3/3
salt ‘*’ test.ping
salt ‘*’ grains.ls
salt ‘*’ grains.items
salt ‘*’ cmd.has_exec service
salt ‘*’ cmd.run “service nginx stop”
salt ‘*’ cmd.run “service nginx start”
salt ‘*’ cmd.run “yum update -y”

For further reading RTFM↗.