SALT client no longer checks in with SUSE Manager

This document (7021292) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Manager 3.1

SALT clients

Situation

Registering a server using salt works without noticeable problems and everything seems to work perfectly.

After a period of time the client (minion) looses communication with the SUSE Manager (master) server.

Ones the above problem is present the following error can be observed in the webui:

Specified SLS custom.custom_xxxxx in saltenv base is not available on the salt master or through a configured fileserver

This is indeed the problem, verifying the machine specific high state file is no longer present.

Upon registration the machine specific high state custom_xxxxx.sls file is created in '/srv/susemanager/salt/custom', if the custom_xxxxx.sls disappears, the above mentioned error is seen in the webUI.

Resolution

One possible scenario is that the '/etc/machine-id' has changed or is not present anymore.

In this case the file can be recreated and the machine-id stored in the SUSE Manager database can be used as the machine-id.

Cause

SUSE Manager relies on the machine-id in '/etc/machine-id' to check if a Salt minion is already registered to the SUSE Manager server.

If the machine-id of the minion changes, SUSE Manager will try to register it as a new system. In this case the operation fails because there's a database unique constraint on the hostname of the client which makes it impossible to register a server with the same hostname twice. The minion remains registered in the database (with the old machine-id), so everything appears to be fine in the SUSE Manager webUI.

Disclaimer

This Support Knowledgebase provides a valuable tool for SUSE customers and parties interested in our products and solutions to acquire information, ideas and learn from one another. Materials are provided for informational, personal or non-commercial use within your organization and are presented "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.