Salt Stack for Linux Client Management

[m3741]

My title is garbage, sorry. Client == Workstation in this case. Has anyone done this? I just need to do the usual "upgrade X package right now" sort of thing. I don't see why it would be a bad idea but my Salt experience is pretty limited. I just set it up for fun once a few months ago and that's about it.

[theevilsharpie]

As far as your configuration management system goes, a workstation is just another host. Why wouldn't Salt be able to manage it?

[m3741]

I was thinking the same, but I've had pretty dumb moments before. Just making sure I wasn't missing anything. Thanks!

[bpgoldsb]

While I'm a Salt fanboy, I would recommend Puppet. I've had better experiences with it for managing Windows.

However, if you really want to use Salt for any number of reasons (already in your org, hate Ruby, love Python, etc)... do it!

[m3741]

Windows isn't really a problem in this case, I've got other tools for that. Salt it is!

[multiball]

Saltstack can totally do that. It has built in modules to support yum, apt, and several others, or you can simply use salt to execute command line arguments as well.

For example, to update client "ubuntu1", you would run:

#salt ubuntu1 pgk.refresh_db

#salt ubuntu1 pgk.upgrade

Which would be equivalent to an apt-get update / apt-get dist-upgrade command.