Salt 0.10.2 Release Notes¶

Ext Pillar Modules¶

The ranks of available Salt modules directories sees a new member in 0.10.2. With the popularity of pillar a higher demand has arisen for ext_pillar interfaces to be more like regular Salt module additions. Now ext_pillar interfaces can be added in the same way as other modules, just drop it into the pillar directory in the salt source.

Minion Events¶

In 0.10.0 an event system was added to the Salt master. 0.10.2 adds the event system to the minions as well. Now event can be published on a local minion as well.

The minions can also send events back up to the master. This means that Salt is able to communicate individual events from the minions back up to the Master which are not associated with command.

Minion Data Caching¶

When pillar was introduced the landscape for available data was greatly enhanced. The minion's began sending grain data back to the master on a regular basis.

The new config option on the master called minion_data_cache instructs the Salt master to maintain a cache of the minion's grains and pillar data in the cachedir. This option is turned off by default to avoid hitting the disk more, but when enabled the cache is used to make grain matching from the salt command more powerful, since the minions that will match can be predetermined.

Backup Files¶

By default all files replaced by the file.managed and file.recurse states we simply deleted. 0.10.2 adds a new option. By setting the backup option to minion the files are backed up before they are replaced.

The backed up files are located in the cachedir under the file_backup directory. On a default system this will be at: /var/cache/salt/file_backup

Configuration files¶

salt-master and salt-minion automatically load additional configuration files from master.d/*.conf respective minion.d/*.conf where master.d/minion.d is a directory in the same directory as the main configuration file.

Salt Key Verification¶

A number of users complained that they had inadvertently deleted the wrong salt authentication keys. 0.10.2 now displays what keys are going to be deleted and verifies that they are the keys that are intended for deletion.

Key auto-signing¶

If autosign_file is specified in the configuration file incoming keys will be compared to the list of keynames in autosign_file. Regular expressions as well as globbing is supported.

The file must only be writable by the user otherwise the file will be ignored. To relax the permission and allow group write access set the permissive_pki_access option.

Module changes¶

Consistency Testing¶

Another testing script has been added. A bug was found in pillar when many minions generated pillar data at the same time. The new consist.py script is the tests directory was created to reproduce bugs where data should always be consistent.

Master and Minion Stability Fixes¶

As Salt deployments grow new ways to break Salt are discovered. 0.10.2 comes with a number of fixes for the minions and master greatly improving Salt stability.