Salt Minion

Installing Salt Minion on Redhat Servers...

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpmyum install salt-minion

Once installed, and before you start it, be sure to edit the `/etc/salt/minion` file for the following details...

id: Salt Keys are based on this value. And by default this value is based on the hostname of this machine. AWS sets a hostname that is based on the IP, and that can change each time you reboot. So it is best to set the ID yourself.

For the LDAP servers, I've been using a convention of "ldapdev1" which specifies the role, then the environment, and then a sequence to make sure the ID is unique among servers.

For the Jetty servers, we've been using a convention of "jetty-090983204" where the series of numbers actually represents the time the machine was started up as seconds since the UNIX Epoch as found by `date+"%s"`. Note that at some point, we anticipate establishing the `id` will be automated through a utility called `salt-cloud` with the base pattern 'role'-'environment'_'Epoch_Seconds'.

You will also want to establish the role for the machine, which will tell the Salt Master what should be installed and enabled on that machine. The 'roles' list is found by searching the /etc/salt/minion file.