SaltStack Working Group

Meeting Date

• TEAMS: 2021-09-01

Invitees - Attendees

• Dave, Anthony, Lawrence, Lori, Nathan

Any corrections to previous meeting minutes.

Proposed Agenda Items

salt.cscf.uwaterloo.ca alias

• Should alias continue to exist now that we've decommissioned salt-202.cscf.uwaterloo.ca?
  • No - because undefined minions will look for salt.domain
• if yes, what hostname should it now be attached to?
  • what about salt-inf and salt-rsg ? Nope - cuz of OS releases
  • salt-csi-1804/2004 salt-rsg-1804/2004
  • can create an index of valid host keys for each salt masters
  • Anthony: already export a list of minions his Salt masters support, eg:
    • http://salt-csi-1804.cscf.uwaterloo.ca:8079/minions
    • all INF Salt masters run lighttpd and expose a number of useful bits of information
    • Action item: Anthony to share what he's doing there with Nathan
  • Action item: handling Cname for salt.cscf alias - already done
  • salt-top - should at least follow above conventions
    • was for Fraser to do work and ugster cluster
  • Anthony feels that everyone (who works on Salt) should have their own dev master
  • Anthony notes that outside of he and Nathan, very little use by other staff of Salt

Encouraging others to use Salt

• now need to encourage other CSCF staff to use Salt more
• Lawrence suggests keeping some consistency amongst various Salt managers
• "cleverness to be avoided when possible" (so that it is understandable later)
• YAML is mostly self-documenting

20.04 web servers

• how are we doing with these?
  • Anthony: happy to provide containers/VMs
  • Nathan converting his recipes to work with other 20.04 infrastructure
  • Lawrence: expectation is that the web servers will be moved to have salt-csi-2004 Salt master (from RSG)
• can we create a test server and have people start to test their web sites?

OpenVPN

• is the new production 20.04 system in place?
  • need to review the OpenVPN recipe
  • current 16.04 system is vulnerable

what are our outstanding older systems most in need of moving to 20.04?

• Fraser re-ran the survey of older systems, lots there to do