Salt Installation On Centos 5.5

calendarOct 18, 2014 · 2 min read · centos5 python salt saltstack zeromq  ·
Share on: linkedincopy

When you follow the instruction step in the installation guide for Centos 5.5, the package manager automatically installs ZeroMQ in version 2.2. This ZeroMQ version makes some troubles. Therefore, Salt recommends using ZeroMQ in version >= 3.2. There is no ZeroMQ package for this version available in the official Centos 5 repositories, neither in EPEL. So the community prepares some RPMs for Centos 5 for installing ZeroMQ in version 3.3.2.2. This post describes which steps has to be done to install Salt 2014.1.11 on a Centos 5.5 64bit.

Common Installation Steps on Salt Master Node and Salt Minion Nodes

  1. EnableEPEL repository sudo yum install epel-release
  2. Install the Python 2.6 development package sudo yum install python26-devel.x86_64
  3. Installl all RPMs listed on this site.
1sudo rpm -Uvh http://docs.saltstack.com/downloads/cent5/libzmq3-3.2.2-13.1.x86_64.rpm
2sudo rpm -Uvh http://docs.saltstack.com/downloads/cent5/python-zmq-debuginfo-13.1.0-1.x86_64.rpm
3sudo rpm -Uvh http://docs.saltstack.com/downloads/cent5/python26-zmq-13.1.0-1.x86_64.rpm
4sudo rpm -Uvh http://docs.saltstack.com/downloads/cent5/python26-zmq-tests-13.1.0-1.x86_64.rpm
5sudo rpm -Uvh http://docs.saltstack.com/downloads/cent5/zeromq-3.2.2-13.1.x86_64.rpm
6sudo rpm -Uvh http://docs.saltstack.com/downloads/cent5/zeromq-debuginfo-3.2.2-13.1.x86_64.rpm
7sudo rpm -Uvh http://docs.saltstack.com/downloads/cent5/zeromq-devel-3.2.2-13.1.x86_64.rpm

Specific Installation Steps on Salt Master Node

Now, we can follow the official installation steps.

  1. Install Salt Master sudo yum install salt-master

Specific Installation Steps on Salt Minion Node

Again, we can follow the official installation step.

  1. Install Salt Minion sudo yum install salt-minion

Configuration

This section describes only the important configuration issues for running the first command from a master to its  minions. For the whole configuration possibilities, please check the Salt configuration documentation. For a successful communication between master and minions, two configuration are important.

  • Set up the firewall on the master side and
  • key exchange between master and minions (because the communication is encrypted).

Firewall Configuration

By default Salt listens on ports 4505 and 4506. Therefore, the firewall has to be configured to accept incoming communication on these ports.

  1. Open /etc/sysconfig/iptables as root with your favourite editor.
  2. Add following lines -A INPUT -m state --state new -m tcp -p tcp --dport 4505 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -m state --state new -m tcp -p tcp --dport 4506 -j ACCEPT
  3. Restart the service iptables sudo service iptables restart

Key Exchange Configuration

The master can only send commands to minion whose keys are accepted by the master.

  1. Start the minion on the minion node. salt-minion
  2. Ensure that the master runs on the master node. salt-master
  3. On the master node, look which keys aren't accepted salt-key -L
  4. To accept all unaccepted key call on the master node salt-key -A
  5. To test whether the minion is available by the master, call on the master node salt name-of-minion test.ping

Further Information