How to configure a Salt minion on FreeBSD
This post documents how to setup a Salt minion (or client) role on a FreeBSD system. This post continues where the How to install Saltstack on FreeBSD blog post stops.
Requirements
The following requirements have to be in place to be able to implement what is described in this post:
- an up to date FreeBSD system version 11.x
- with SaltStack installed
- see also How to install Saltstack on FreeBSD
Setting up a Salt minion
The first step in setting up a Salt minion is to provision a Salt minion configuration file. The name of this configuration file is minion and resides in the directory /usr/local/etc/salt. The Salt installation provides a minion.sample file with all the knobs and options. But to start with this is all to much. The contents of our Salt minion configuration file are:
master: ip address of master
That is simple, right? Just 1 line of configuration with just the IP address of the Salt master.
The next step is to make sure that the Salt minion processes can be started:
# sysrc salt_minion_enable="YES"
and then start them
# service salt_minion start
Next is to register the minion with the master by using the following commands on the master:
# salt-key -A -y
Results
With the above all done we have some Salt minion processes running:
# ps ax | grep salt-minion | grep -v grep
and we have the Salt minion process connected to the master on TCP port 4505:
# sockstat -4 | grep python2.7
On the master we can also check if all is ok for this minion:
# sockstat -4 | grep python2.7
and
# salt '*' test.ping
And this completes the configuration of a Salt minion!
Resources
Some (other) resources about this subject: