Salt Proxy Minion SSH End-to-End Example¶

The following is walkthrough that documents how to run a sample SSH service and configure one or more proxy minions to talk to and control it.

1. This walkthrough uses a custom SSH shell to provide an end to end example. Any other shells can be used too.

2. Setup the proxy command shell as shown https://github.com/saltstack/salt-contrib/tree/master/proxyminion_ssh_example

Now, configure your salt-proxy.

1. Edit /etc/salt/proxy and add an entry for your master's location

master: localhost
multiprocessing: False

2. On your salt-master, ensure that pillar is configured properly. Select an ID for your proxy (in this example we will name the proxy with the letter 'p' followed by the port the proxy is answering on). In your pillar topfile, place an entry for your proxy:

base:
  'p8000':
    - p8000

This says that Salt's pillar should load some values for the proxy p8000 from the file /srv/pillar/p8000.sls (if you have not changed your default pillar_roots)

3. In the pillar root for your base environment, create the p8000.sls file with the following contents:

proxy:
  proxytype: ssh_sample
  host: saltyVM
  username: salt
  password: badpass

4. Make sure your salt-master is running.

5. Start the salt-proxy in debug mode

salt-proxy --proxyid=p8000 -l debug

6. Accept your proxy's key on your salt-master

salt-key -y -a p8000
The following keys are going to be accepted:
Unaccepted Keys:
p8000
Key for minion p8000 accepted.

7. Now you should be able to run commands on your proxy.

salt p8000 pkg.list_pkgs

8. The SSH shell implements a degenerately simple pkg. To "install" a package, use a standard pkg.install. If you pass '==' and a version number after the package name then the service will parse that and accept that as the package's version.