Book Image

Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

Book Image

Mastering SaltStack - Second Edition

Overview of this book

SaltStack is a powerful configuration management and automation suite designed to manage servers and tens of thousands of nodes. This book showcases Salt as a very powerful automation framework. We will review the fundamental concepts to get you in the right frame of mind, and then explore Salt in much greater depth. You will explore Salt SSH as a powerful tool and take Salt Cloud to the next level. Next, you’ll master using Salt services with ease in your infrastructure. You will discover methods and strategies to scale your infrastructure properly. You will also learn how to use Salt as a powerful monitoring tool. By the end of this book, you will have learned troubleshooting tips and best practices to make the entire process of using Salt pain-free and easy.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering SaltStack Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Using the raw SSH mode


Salt SSH is very powerful in its default mode with salt-thin. However, there are some situations where it makes more sense to issue a raw SSH command. This can be accomplished using the --raw flag (referred to in its short form as -r from here on for brevity).

Using the raw mode will bypass all the overhead of creating and deploying the thin package: just log in to the target, issue a command, and log out. The following two commands are functionally identical:

# salt-ssh myminion cmd.run date
myminion:
    Fri Apr  3 21:07:43 MDT 2015
# salt-ssh -r myminion date
myminion:
    ----------
    retcode:
        0
    stderr:
    stdout:
        Fri Apr  3 21:07:43 MDT 2015

However, the raw command will execute faster because it has less overhead. It will also contain more information, such as STDERR, STDOUT, and the exit or return code from the command that was issued.

This can be useful if you wrap Salt SSH with another program that depends on the output (especially the...