High concentration of Salt, not just in the Dead Sea

Finally, the wait has an end: Earlier this month we made Salt 2015.8.12 available to all customers with a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server subscription!

Dead Sea (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PikiWiki_Israel_14749_dead_sea.JPG)

This may sound like a small step, but, as far as I can tell, it makes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server the first Linux distribution that comes with a fully supported and maintained latest-generation configuration management stack! Last time we checked, our competition asked you to either pay extra or use unsupported packages for Ansible on their Enterprise Linux.

If you are not addicted to Salt yet, of course our existing supported Puppet and CFEngine packages are still there as well.

In part one of this series I’ll show you how to add Salt to your Linux diet. In part two I’m going to answer the most frequently asked questions.

Adding Salt packages from YaST

If you are using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with the graphical desktop installed, you can add the Advanced Systems Management Module from YaST. As a pre-requisite, make sure that your system is registered against the SUSE Customer Center or your SMT Server. First go to the Product Registration module:

YaST Registration Module

Now you click “Select Extensions”:

Product Registration

From the list, you select “Advanced Systems Management Module”:

Available extensions

Now you can add the Salt packages via the Software Management module:

Software Management Module

You can search by name, but to find all Salt packages, that are currently available, you can also choose to show all packages from the Advanced Systems Management Updates repository:

Selecting the Salt packages in YaST

If you just want to install the Salt Minion, so you can connect your system to an existing Salt Master or SUSE Manager server, select “salt-minion”. This will also select the necessary package dependencies.

To set up your own standalon Salt Master, select “salt-master”. In that case you may also want to add “salt-ssh” (if you want to connect to your managed systems without having to run a Salt Minion on them) and/or “salt-api” (if you are planning to use Salt through its API, not the command line).

Another very interesting part of Salt is called “salt-cloud”. But that’s a topic for another blog post.

Now all you need is to look into the Salt documentation and give it a try. 🙂

By the way: If you are wondering how I came up with the headline: This is Joachim Werner, who wrote most of this blog post on the way back from the SUSE Expert Day in Tel Aviv, Israel.

And while we are at it: I’ll also be presenting SUSE Manager and Salt at the Expert Days in Dublin, Oslo, Cape Town, and Johannesburg. So if you haven’t registered yet, hurry up!