24th may 2026

Salt-stack

Salt is a management tool similar to ansible. The key difference are that in salt there is 'Minions' and 'Masters'. Salt stack can be set up with salt states that are applied to the minions from a defined master. Salt stack is my most used tool in managing Linux. This where I will ensure my servers in my homelab are consistent over time and allowing me to make global changes.

Goals

2nd June 2026

My goals for this project are the following

Setting up my servers as minions to talk to the master
Creating a top file for managed states either targeted or global
Setting custom grains
Managed local firewall
Managed sshd config
Managed sudoers file

Setting up minions

2nd June 2026

Installing and connecting a minion is very simple. You can easily follow the guide from the salt project docs that can be found by clicking here

For debain family installs which most of my servers are bar a few you can just copy and paste below for salt minion version3006.* which is the LTS version of salt stack. I believe the next LTS version will be 3008 which will be released very soon

# Ensure keyrings dir exists
mkdir -m 755 -p /etc/apt/keyrings
# Download public key
curl -fsSL https://packages.broadcom.com/artifactory/api/security/keypair/SaltProjectKey/public | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/salt-archive-keyring.pgp > /dev/null
# Create apt repo target configuration
curl -fsSL https://github.com/saltstack/salt-install-guide/releases/latest/download/salt.sources | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/salt.sources

# Pinning salt version to 3006.*

echo 'Package: salt-*
Pin: version 3006.*
Pin-Priority: 1001' | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/salt-pin-1001


#install the salt minion and needed parts for a salt-minions
sudo apt-get install salt-master
sudo apt-get install salt-minion
sudo apt-get install salt-ssh
sudo apt-get install salt-syndic
sudo apt-get install salt-cloud
sudo apt-get install salt-api


# enable and start the salt minion
sudo systemctl enable salt-master && sudo systemctl start salt-master
sudo systemctl enable salt-minion && sudo systemctl start salt-minion
sudo systemctl enable salt-syndic && sudo systemctl start salt-syndic
sudo systemctl enable salt-api && sudo systemctl start salt-api

The next step of setting up your minion is pointing it to a master. The config for this is held in /etc/salt/minion in this file you will need to set the master: You can overwrite the whole file like I have done below

root@radarr:~# echo "master: slt-01" > /etc/salt/minion
root@radarr:~# systemctl restart salt-minion

Next to accept the minion you will need to accept the keys/minions -A will accept all pending keys. You can also run salt-key -a “minion fqdn”

salt-key -A