Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
Hi Diego, On 10/5/23 14:59, Diego Zuccato wrote: Does someone use FAI to install the base system that will be managed by Salt? I'm trying to integrate 'em but there's still something that doesn't "click"... My current idea is to use Salt to orchestrate the install, but maybe it's better left to FAI? How can I "pass around" minion key so I don't have to manually re-approve the new key every time? The ideal scenario would be: target generates its keypair, sends the pubkey to FAI that "certifies" it's from the system being installed and passes it to Salt. Should I write a custom fai-monitor (that would be needed anyway to disable netboot once system is reinstalled)? we usually try with the hardware level configuration being the "border", i.e. everything related to partitioning, initial OS install, at least initial networking set-up is done with FAI (well, and salt is installed configured as well). Then FAI reboots the server and upon service start, the server starts a highstate and performs the remaining configuration. To set-up salt, we wrote our own script around fai-chboot which ssh into the salt-master, creates a keypair and copies the files to the appropriate places. FAI will install the private key during the installation and the public key is already known on the master, no need to accept the keys anymore. Does that help a bit? Cheers Carsten -- Dr. Carsten Aulbert, Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Callinstraße 38, 30167 Hannover, Germany, Phone +49 511 762 17185 smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
Il 05/10/2023 15:17, Carsten Aulbert ha scritto: we usually try with the hardware level configuration being the "border", i.e. everything related to partitioning, initial OS install, at least initial networking set-up is done with FAI (well, and salt is installed configured as well). Ok, that's good. Then FAI reboots the server and upon service start, the server starts a highstate and performs the remaining configuration. Ok, no problem here. To set-up salt, we wrote our own script around fai-chboot which ssh into the salt-master, creates a keypair and copies the files to the appropriate places. Uhm... I don't really like that ssh step. But probably can be straightened out making salt get the pubkey from FAI's state. FAI will install the private key during the installation and the public key is already known on the master, no need to accept the keys anymore. I like even less that the private key is passed from FAI to the target, I'd prefer to only pass back the pubkey. Does that help a bit? Yes, tks. -- Diego Zuccato DIFA - Dip. di Fisica e Astronomia Servizi Informatici Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna V.le Berti-Pichat 6/2 - 40127 Bologna - Italy tel.: +39 051 20 95786
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
Diese Nachricht wurde eingewickelt um DMARC-kompatibel zu sein. Die eigentliche Nachricht steht dadurch in einem Anhang. This message was wrapped to be DMARC compliant. The actual message text is therefore in an attachment.--- Begin Message --- Hi Diego Its been a while since I worked with Salt, but IIRC it sounds like what is not "clicking" is that you need to fix the TOFU problem. Looking back through my notes, it seems https://docs.saltproject.io/en/latest/topics/tutorials/multimaster_pki.html might be worth a read. In particular, maybe "master_sign_pubkey: True" on the Salt master, "verify_master_pubkey_sign: True" on the minion, and the master pubkeys put in "/etc/salt/pki/minion/" on the minions. Then on Salt master all you have to do is approve the new connections as they come online. --- Original Message --- On Thursday, October 5th, 2023 at 13:59, Diego Zuccato wrote: > Hello all. > > Does someone use FAI to install the base system that will be managed by > Salt? > I'm trying to integrate 'em but there's still something that doesn't > "click"... > > My current idea is to use Salt to orchestrate the install, but maybe > it's better left to FAI? How can I "pass around" minion key so I don't > have to manually re-approve the new key every time? > The ideal scenario would be: target generates its keypair, sends the > pubkey to FAI that "certifies" it's from the system being installed and > passes it to Salt. Should I write a custom fai-monitor (that would be > needed anyway to disable netboot once system is reinstalled)? > > TIA. > > -- > Diego Zuccato > DIFA - Dip. di Fisica e Astronomia > Servizi Informatici > Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna > V.le Berti-Pichat 6/2 - 40127 Bologna - Italy > tel.: +39 051 20 95786 --- End Message ---
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
You can essentially establish a ’trust’ to auto-accept keys. Then you wouldn’t really have to worry about moving the minion keys around. Once your bootstrap/installation is done, have it run a state to remove the key or auto-purge it somehow. Honestly I would just leave the base install and anything else that needs to be set up to FAI and run salt against the booted up server after FAI is done and the server has been rebooted. On October 5, 2023 at 6:54:51 AM, Laura Smith via linux-fai ( linux-fai@uni-koeln.de) wrote: Diese Nachricht wurde eingewickelt um DMARC-kompatibel zu sein. Die eigentliche Nachricht steht dadurch in einem Anhang. This message was wrapped to be DMARC compliant. The actual message text is therefore in an attachment. Hi Diego Its been a while since I worked with Salt, but IIRC it sounds like what is not "clicking" is that you need to fix the TOFU problem. Looking back through my notes, it seems https://docs.saltproject.io/en/latest/topics/tutorials/multimaster_pki.html might be worth a read. In particular, maybe "master_sign_pubkey: True" on the Salt master, "verify_master_pubkey_sign: True" on the minion, and the master pubkeys put in "/etc/salt/pki/minion/" on the minions. Then on Salt master all you have to do is approve the new connections as they come online. --- Original Message --- On Thursday, October 5th, 2023 at 13:59, Diego Zuccato < diego.zucc...@unibo.it> wrote: > Hello all. > > Does someone use FAI to install the base system that will be managed by > Salt? > I'm trying to integrate 'em but there's still something that doesn't > "click"... > > My current idea is to use Salt to orchestrate the install, but maybe > it's better left to FAI? How can I "pass around" minion key so I don't > have to manually re-approve the new key every time? > The ideal scenario would be: target generates its keypair, sends the > pubkey to FAI that "certifies" it's from the system being installed and > passes it to Salt. Should I write a custom fai-monitor (that would be > needed anyway to disable netboot once system is reinstalled)? > > TIA. > > -- > Diego Zuccato > DIFA - Dip. di Fisica e Astronomia > Servizi Informatici > Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna > V.le Berti-Pichat 6/2 - 40127 Bologna - Italy > tel.: +39 051 20 95786
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
Il 05/10/2023 15:54, Laura Smith via linux-fai ha scritto: Its been a while since I worked with Salt, but IIRC it sounds like what is not "clicking" is that you need to fix the TOFU problem. Actually there are 2 distinct problems: - pass the pubkey from the minion to FAI during the install (possibly in an authenticated way) - authorize that key in Salt from FAI Looking back through my notes, it seemshttps://docs.saltproject.io/en/latest/topics/tutorials/multimaster_pki.html might be worth a read. I don't understand. In my scenario, FAI is not a Salt master. And I don't see how making it one could help. It would only double the burden. In particular, maybe "master_sign_pubkey: True" on the Salt master, "verify_master_pubkey_sign: True" on the minion, and the master pubkeys put in "/etc/salt/pki/minion/" on the minions. Then on Salt master all you have to do is approve the new connections as they come online. I'd have to approve on *both* masters. :( -- Diego Zuccato DIFA - Dip. di Fisica e Astronomia Servizi Informatici Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna V.le Berti-Pichat 6/2 - 40127 Bologna - Italy tel.: +39 051 20 95786
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
Il 05/10/2023 16:58, Sinh Lam ha scritto: You can essentially establish a ’trust’ to auto-accept keys. Then you wouldn’t really have to worry about moving the minion keys around. Once your bootstrap/installation is done, have it run a state to remove the key or auto-purge it somehow. Uh? If the minion is not known to the master, it doesn't receive pillars. And can't interact with the master. Chicken and egg. Honestly I would just leave the base install and anything else that needs to be set up to FAI and run salt against the booted up server after FAI is done and the server has been rebooted. That's what I was planning to do. But without extra "glue" I'm losing context. In particular if FAI tells Salt "I'm having *this* machine reinstalled and its key is this" then Salt can auto-accept that key. But if the machine is not being reinstalled by FAI, there's no reason to auto accept a new key: it could be anybody! Does FAI use protected connections (given that usually there's no available "root of trust" stronger than the MAC address...) to the machine being installed? -- Diego Zuccato DIFA - Dip. di Fisica e Astronomia Servizi Informatici Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna V.le Berti-Pichat 6/2 - 40127 Bologna - Italy tel.: +39 051 20 95786
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
Reading through your original post - I think there might be some confusion as to what SaltStack does and what FAI does (if not, I apologize). SaltStack is a configuration management tool that is normally used to ensure the target minion's configuration is exactly as it should, while FAI is a provisioning tool that essentially builds the server that SaltStack is used to manage. With the above said, I do not see what you mean there is a chicken and the egg problem. I do not believe that salt can do the actual installation of the server’s OS because there’s no minion running to begin with. You should really leave that to FAI. Your concern was how to move the minion around servers that are getting provisioned/re-provisioned so you don’t have to approve the minion each time and I’m sure there’s a couple of ways to do this but right now I see two : 1) turn on auto-accept - you don’t have to worry about approving any minions because they’ll be auto-approved 2) issue a call to the salt master to accept the new minion when it is registered during fai. This involves you knowing the minion id/name of the key. This is how I’m planning on using SaltStack with FAI - I have a dedicated network that is tightly controlled so to that point I know what connects to it and I know why those servers are connected to that particular network. In essence, I trust this particular network. Because of this, I have auto-accept turned on my salt master. I have FAI install the base os on the server, toward the end of the process, a couple things will happen: * a script will be used to auto-register this server with our CMDB * a script will be used to enroll this minion with the salt-master and set the minion_id (if needed). Once the above two is done, FAI will issue a reboot of the server. Once the server is back up, the salt-minion will reconnect with the salt master and because the key is already accepted (because I have auto-accept turned on), a high state will run. Regarding pillar data, I have an external pillar that pulls information about the minion from the CMDB and generates all the relevant pillar data the states need to use. That’s it. FAI does the OS (and handles the registering of the server with our CMDB and the minion with the master), and salt stack takes care of the configuration of the server. I hope this provides some clarity as to how to use FAI with SaltStack. The glue I believe you’re talking about is a source of truth to populate pillar data and grains so your salt states can actually do something useful. The above scenario is what I’m about to implement. I have a CMDB that contains information about the very server FAI is provisioning. This information from the CMDB will populate the pillars which will feed into states to dynamically do whatever it is that server is provisioned for. You can do some manual work and pre-populate the CMDB or use FAI to auto-register this information with the CMDB so on the next boot, when the salt-minion is started up again and connects to the master (because the key is already accepted) a high state will get ran against that particular minion. And MAC addresses can be spoofed quite easily, so you really shouldn’t rely on that as your ‘root of trust’. I deal with a lot of VMs and each one of those VMs I can easily specify whatever MAC address I want (you really shouldn’t). But spoofing a MAC while it’s in the early parts of pxe/net boot process is harder (if not impossible), you still shouldn’t use it as the ‘root of trust’. https://www.tutorialspoint.com/how-to-modify-mac-address-in-windows-10-both-wired-and-wireless-adapter https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/MAC_address_spoofing The above are two examples of how to do just that but I’m not sure what you mean by protected connections. FAI is ran after the server is pxe/net booted. You can pull the root down using a squashfs image or something via https but otherwise I’m not entirely sure what you mean. On October 5, 2023 at 9:59:01 PM, Diego Zuccato (diego.zucc...@unibo.it) wrote: Il 05/10/2023 16:58, Sinh Lam ha scritto: > You can essentially establish a ’trust’ to auto-accept keys. Then you > wouldn’t really have to worry about moving the minion keys around. Once > your bootstrap/installation is done, have it run a state to remove the > key or auto-purge it somehow. Uh? If the minion is not known to the master, it doesn't receive pillars. And can't interact with the master. Chicken and egg. > Honestly I would just leave the base install and anything else that > needs to be set up to FAI and run salt against the booted up server > after FAI is done and the server has been rebooted. That's what I was planning to do. But without extra "glue" I'm losing context. In particular if FAI tells Salt "I'm having *this* machine reinstalled and its key is this" then Salt can auto-accept that key. But if the machine is not being reinstalled by FAI, there's no reason to auto accept a new key: it could be anybody!
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
On Fri, 2023-10-06 at 06:47 +0200, Diego Zuccato wrote: > Il 05/10/2023 15:54, Laura Smith via linux-fai ha scritto: > > Its been a while since I worked with Salt, but IIRC it sounds like what > > is not "clicking" is that you need to fix the TOFU problem. > > Actually there are 2 distinct problems: > - pass the pubkey from the minion to FAI during the install (possibly in > an authenticated way) > - authorize that key in Salt from FAI Not related to Salt, but possibly an approach that can be used here. I have a script that we run on the FAI server for managing secrets. It will copy secrets, generating them as required, into the NFSROOT and then remove them after a period of time. I have this handling ssh hostkeys so we can get the same keys on a rebuild. It can handle Puppet keys, including signing them, although we no longer use it for Puppet. This isn't ideal as the secrets are still present in the NFSROOT for a short period of time, but does solve the chicken and egg issue others mentioned and removes the need for a generic "sign any request that comes in" that others have suggested. Cheers, Andrew -- Andrew Ruthven, Wellington, New Zealand and...@etc.gen.nz | Catalyst Cloud: | This space intentionally left blank https://catalystcloud.nz |
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
Il 06/10/2023 10:36, Sinh Lam ha scritto: Reading through your original post - I think there might be some confusion as to what SaltStack does and what FAI does (if not, I apologize). SaltStack is a configuration management tool that is normally used to ensure the target minion's configuration is exactly as it should, while FAI is a provisioning tool that essentially builds the server that SaltStack is used to manage. No need to apologize even if I already knew the difference between FAI and Salt :) With the above said, I do not see what you mean there is a chicken and the egg problem. To approve a minion key, Salt does have to trust the request is coming from the right minion, but it can't know till the key is approved. I do not believe that salt can do the actual installation of the server’s OS because there’s no minion running to begin with. You should really leave that to FAI. Yes, sure. Other tools (like xCat) try to do both and are IMVHO way less versatile. Your concern was how to move the minion around servers that are getting provisioned/re-provisioned so you don’t have to approve the minion each time and I’m sure there’s a couple of ways to do this but right now I see two : 1) turn on auto-accept - you don’t have to worry about approving any minions because they’ll be auto-approved Can't do that on public networks. [*] 2) issue a call to the salt master to accept the new minion when it is registered during fai. This involves you knowing the minion id/name of the key. That's what I'd like to make FAI do. If only there was a 'hook' system on FAI server, triggering scripts at the different stages... The nearest thing I could think of is a custom fai-monitor but it seems quite unsafe :( This is how I’m planning on using SaltStack with FAI - I have a dedicated network that is tightly controlled so to that point I know what connects to it and I know why those servers are connected to that particular network. In essence, I trust this particular network. Because of this, I have auto-accept turned on my salt master. Can't do that: my networks are often exposed. The alternative would mean having to dynamically reconfigure switches to move ports to different VLANs... Quite a big can of worms on its own :( I have FAI install the base os on the server, toward the end of the process, a couple things will happen: * a script will be used to auto-register this server with our CMDB * a script will be used to enroll this minion with the salt-master and set the minion_id (if needed). How does your script authenticate the requests? Or are you just relying on the "secured network" to bypass authentication? [...] That’s it. FAI does the OS (and handles the registering of the server with our CMDB and the minion with the master), and salt stack takes care of the configuration of the server. That's the desiderable outcome :) The glue I believe you’re talking about is a source of truth to populate pillar data and grains so your salt states can actually do something useful. No, that's already taken care of :) And MAC addresses can be spoofed quite easily, so you really shouldn’t rely on that as your ‘root of trust’. I deal with a lot of VMs and each one of those VMs I can easily specify whatever MAC address I want (you really shouldn’t). But spoofing a MAC while it’s in the early parts of pxe/net boot process is harder (if not impossible), you still shouldn’t use it as the ‘root of trust’. Yup, I know. Already did it in DOS :) But stronger authentication either requires TPM or interaction. -- Diego Zuccato DIFA - Dip. di Fisica e Astronomia Servizi Informatici Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna V.le Berti-Pichat 6/2 - 40127 Bologna - Italy tel.: +39 051 20 95786
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
> On Fri, 06 Oct 2023 21:57:28 +1300, Andrew Ruthven > said: > This isn't ideal as the secrets are still present in the NFSROOT for a short > period of time, but does solve the chicken and egg issue others mentioned This reminds me of a solution I once saw. Put some info into a fifo (named pipe), so only one receiver can read it. After that the fifo is empty. What about having a daemon on the FAI server which serves some secrect using: echo secrect | nc -p 12345 -l So only one FAI client can read the secrect from port 12345 once. This may help a little bit. -- regards Thomas
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
I really like it a lot! Not bulletproof but more secure than a file. Still no way to have "hooks" run on FAI server? Diego Il 06/10/2023 11:18, Thomas Lange ha scritto: On Fri, 06 Oct 2023 21:57:28 +1300, Andrew Ruthven said: > This isn't ideal as the secrets are still present in the NFSROOT for a short > period of time, but does solve the chicken and egg issue others mentioned This reminds me of a solution I once saw. Put some info into a fifo (named pipe), so only one receiver can read it. After that the fifo is empty. What about having a daemon on the FAI server which serves some secrect using: echo secrect | nc -p 12345 -l So only one FAI client can read the secrect from port 12345 once. This may help a little bit. -- Diego Zuccato DIFA - Dip. di Fisica e Astronomia Servizi Informatici Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna V.le Berti-Pichat 6/2 - 40127 Bologna - Italy tel.: +39 051 20 95786
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
On Fri, 2023-10-06 at 11:36 +0200, Diego Zuccato wrote: > I really like it a lot! > Not bulletproof but more secure than a file. > > Still no way to have "hooks" run on FAI server? We kind of do this, we call it Semi Automatic Installer (SAI). But the problem is that you still need to have some credentials in the NFSROOT to talk to the server. It is primarily used for fetching and storing answers to questions on the server. This allows us to have interactive builds that can save the answers to the server so the next build can be automatic. Hence the "Semi". -- Andrew Ruthven, Wellington, New Zealand and...@etc.gen.nz | Catalyst Cloud: | This space intentionally left blank https://catalystcloud.nz |
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
On Fri, 2023-10-06 at 11:18 +0200, Thomas Lange wrote: > > > > > > On Fri, 06 Oct 2023 21:57:28 +1300, Andrew Ruthven > > > > > > said: > > > This isn't ideal as the secrets are still present in the NFSROOT for > a short > > period of time, but does solve the chicken and egg issue others > mentioned > This reminds me of a solution I once saw. > Put some info into a fifo (named pipe), so only one receiver can read > it. After that the fifo is empty. > > What about having a daemon on the FAI server which serves some secrect > using: > echo secrect | nc -p 12345 -l > > So only one FAI client can read the secrect from port 12345 once. > This may help a little bit. This could help. It could also do some level of validation of the IP/MAC that the request is coming from, especially if you've used fai-chboot. Again not ideal, but better. The thing I like about my solution is that fcopy just works. :) Cheers, Andrew -- Andrew Ruthven, Wellington, New Zealand and...@etc.gen.nz | Catalyst Cloud: | This space intentionally left blank https://catalystcloud.nz |
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
> On Oct 6, 2023, at 10:59, Diego Zuccato wrote: > > Il 06/10/2023 10:36, Sinh Lam ha scritto: >> With the above said, I do not see what you mean there is a chicken and the >> egg problem. > > To approve a minion key, Salt does have to trust the request is coming from > the right minion, but it can't know till the key is approved. Embed the Salt Master's public key in the FAI environment before the minion is started. While the master won't have the minion key before it contacts it, you can ensure the initial communication with the master is secured and the master is properly identified. The keys themselves are generated by `salt-key --gen-keys` on first run of the minion, if they don't exist. So, during the install, pre-generate the keys with `salt-key`. Just ensure the target directory for the private key ends up in `/etc/salt/pki/minion/minion.pem` and the public key in `/etc/salt/pki/minion/minion.pub`. The master's key needs to be in `/etc/salt/pki/minion/minion_master.pub`. With that, on the salt-master, either autoaccept, or find a way to place the minion's public key in `/etc/salt/pki/master/minions/` and that will bypass the key acceptance entirely. Keys, inside of salt, are just managing where the file sits under the various minion directories in `/etc/salt/pki/master/` after all. >> Your concern was how to move the minion around servers that are getting >> provisioned/re-provisioned so you don’t have to approve the minion each time >> and I’m sure there’s a couple of ways to do this but right now I see two : >> 1) turn on auto-accept - you don’t have to worry about approving any minions >> because they’ll be auto-approved > > Can't do that on public networks. [*] Don't have to do it if you set the master's public key, and minion keys, before the minion is started though. Then it's just having a single job starting after FAI's reboot, and doing `salt-call state.highstate` on first boot.
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
Il 06/10/2023 15:15, Johan Beisser ha scritto: With that, on the salt-master, either autoaccept, or find a way to place the minion's public key in `/etc/salt/pki/master/minions/` and that will bypass the key acceptance entirely. Keys, inside of salt, are just managing where the file sits under the various minion directories in `/etc/salt/pki/master/` after all. Yup. that's exactly where my problem lies: that "find a way" is what I'm looking for :) Don't have to do it if you set the master's public key, and minion keys, before the minion is started though. Well, for the minion it's not a problem, as long as it finds the correct pubkey: if its key is missing, a keypair can be generated. But the master doesn't know this new key (yet). Then it's just having a single job starting after FAI's reboot, and doing `salt-call state.highstate` on first boot. It's not a Salt problem, it's just a "timing issue" that I have to understand well. Once Salt knows a minion is being reinstalled (ideally I triggered it applying a given state), it should sync with FAI to wait the moment the minion is rebooting (or, even better, it receives the minion key before the reboot) and knows it can trust that key. -- Diego Zuccato DIFA - Dip. di Fisica e Astronomia Servizi Informatici Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna V.le Berti-Pichat 6/2 - 40127 Bologna - Italy tel.: +39 051 20 95786
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
Moin, On Thu, Oct 05, 2023 at 02:59:40PM +0200, Diego Zuccato wrote: > Does someone use FAI to install the base system that will be managed by > Salt? Do you have a concrete reason for introducing Salt on top of FAI? FAI can be used to do most of your configuration management via ``fai softupdate`` -- Mit freundlichen Grüßen Henning Glawe Dr. Henning Glawe Max-Planck-Institut für Struktur und Dynamik der Materie Geb. 99 (CFEL), Luruper Chaussee 149, 22761 Hamburg, Germany http://www.mpsd.mpg.de/, Email: henning.gl...@mpsd.mpg.de Building/Room: 99/O2.100, Phone: +49-40-8998-88392
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
On Fri, Oct 06, 2023 at 05:21:30PM +0200, Henning Glawe wrote: > Do you have a concrete reason for introducing Salt on top of FAI? I don't wanna speak for the original poster, but your question sounds a bit like "Do you have a concrete reason for introducing LibreOffice on top of this Unix system which comes with emacs and LaTeX?" ;p > FAI can be used to do most of your configuration management via > ``fai softupdate`` yes, but Salt has features which FAI doesn't have, also the design is very different and then there are tons of existing Salt receipts etc. that said, two things about me, which are besides the point but will probably entertain nonetheless: a.) I've looked at Salt some years ago and didn't like it (too hard to debug was my main concern). b.) since more than a decade (maybe more like 15y) I think that FAI should mean "Fully Automatic Infrastructure" because indeed FAI can do infrastructure management very well, thanks to softupdates! :-) -- cheers, Holger ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ holger@(debian|reproducible-builds|layer-acht).org ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ OpenPGP: B8BF54137B09D35CF026FE9D 091AB856069AAA1C ⠈⠳⣄ No more excuses. Small actions can make a big difference. We recently switched to paper straws on both of my private jets. (@lcamtuf) signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
Yes. They're different tools with different objectives. FAI excels at reinstalling a system, but is not a configuration manager: say you have a webserver (actually 3: dev, test and prod) and you need to change the PHP version in use. Sure, you can reinstall from scratch with FAI, but why? Way faster to just update packages. Or are you reinstalling every time there are system updates instead of using apt full-upgrade? Diego Da: linux-fai per conto di Henning Glawe Inviato: venerdì 6 ottobre 2023 17:21 A: fully automatic installation for Linux Oggetto: Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody? Moin, On Thu, Oct 05, 2023 at 02:59:40PM +0200, Diego Zuccato wrote: > Does someone use FAI to install the base system that will be managed by > Salt? Do you have a concrete reason for introducing Salt on top of FAI? FAI can be used to do most of your configuration management via ``fai softupdate`` -- Mit freundlichen Grüßen Henning Glawe Dr. Henning Glawe Max-Planck-Institut für Struktur und Dynamik der Materie Geb. 99 (CFEL), Luruper Chaussee 149, 22761 Hamburg, Germany http://www.mpsd.mpg.de/, Email: henning.gl...@mpsd.mpg.de Building/Room: 99/O2.100, Phone: +49-40-8998-88392
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
On Thu, Oct 5, 2023 at 9:00 AM Diego Zuccato wrote: > > My current idea is to use Salt to orchestrate the install, but maybe > it's better left to FAI? How can I "pass around" minion key so I don't > have to manually re-approve the new key every time? This is how we manage it. FAI knows what our "base server" should look like in terms of, how we partition disks, and what network interfaces get used for what. The only package beyond the base OS that it installs is salt-minion, and it puts in place our /etc/salt/minion.d/* files. On first boot, the minion tries to join the master, and we approve the new key there manually. The first highstate takes care of adding our site standard base packages, configuration, etc. In our case manually approving the minion key on the master is a small extra step, but I can see how if you're doing dozens of servers a day, or if you have a strong motive for completely unattended reinstalls (fire and forget) that having to approve the minion's key would be a problem. Someone has suggested something like this up-thread, but I think the only way you're going to eliminate that step is if you push a keypair to the minion from FAI, and then have FAI share the public key with the master. You're probably not going to be able to get the minion to start up and do its thing properly until the system boots, and by that time I think you've lost any opportunity to transfer its public key securely without a manual approval step. You could store the public keys that FAI generates in a repository on the FAI server, and have it trigger a Salt webhook to tell the master when it needs to retrieve and install new ones.
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
Moin, as I mentioned: check ``fai softupdate``, this feature of FAI makes it a configuration manager. Your running system gets updated to the state you define in your FAI config without a downtime. No reinstall required. p.s.: call me biased, as I implemented ``softupdate`` almost 20 years ago and use it since then as a configuration manager for a few 1k hosts in various contexts On Fri, Oct 06, 2023 at 04:24:48PM +, Diego Zuccato wrote: > Yes. They're different tools with different objectives. FAI excels at > reinstalling a system, but is not a configuration manager: say you have a > webserver (actually 3: dev, test and prod) and you need to change the PHP > version in use. Sure, you can reinstall from scratch with FAI, but why? Way > faster to just update packages. Or are you reinstalling every time there are > system updates instead of using apt full-upgrade? -- Mit freundlichen Grüßen Henning Glawe Dr. Henning Glawe Max-Planck-Institut für Struktur und Dynamik der Materie Geb. 99 (CFEL), Luruper Chaussee 149, 22761 Hamburg, Germany http://www.mpsd.mpg.de/, Email: henning.gl...@mpsd.mpg.de Building/Room: 99/O2.100, Phone: +49-40-8998-88392
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
On Fri, 2023-10-06 at 20:02 +0200, Henning Glawe wrote: > p.s.: call me biased, as I implemented ``softupdate`` almost 20 years ago > and use it since then as a configuration manager for a few 1k hosts in > various contexts softupdate is very handy. We used to use it at work (and I still do at home) for building Linux VServers, and I have happily used it to bootstrap cloud based instances. The difficulty I run into, and which others might as well, is there is broad knowledge of Puppet, Salt, Ansible, Chef, etc. as well as there being many many modules/recipes/whatever for these tools. Neither of these so much for FAI[0], so the tool used for on-going configuration management tends to be one of these other tools. At work we have a similar model as other people in this thread. FAI to handle the hardware and get a server into a state that it is ready to be taken over by configuration management. For operating system upgrades we do reinstalls rather than dist-upgrades, so FAI also needs to be able to rebuild a server - hence having various secrets able to be deployed during a build. Cheers, Andrew [0] Hmm, is there scope for sharing classes for doing common useful tasks? I have some I can most probably share. Could FAI have a "plugins" directory that mimics the top level of a profile and allow for contained plugins to be installed? -- Andrew Ruthven, Wellington, New Zealand and...@etc.gen.nz | Catalyst Cloud: | This space intentionally left blank https://catalystcloud.nz |
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
Il 06/10/2023 18:33, Matthew Pounsett ha scritto: You could store the public keys that FAI generates in a repository on the FAI server, and have it trigger a Salt webhook to tell the master when it needs to retrieve and install new ones. I'll have to have a look at webhooks. Didn't considere 'em. Could trigger a script that uses salt-cloud to provision the node... Too many ideas :) -- Diego Zuccato DIFA - Dip. di Fisica e Astronomia Servizi Informatici Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna V.le Berti-Pichat 6/2 - 40127 Bologna - Italy tel.: +39 051 20 95786
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
Diese Nachricht wurde eingewickelt um DMARC-kompatibel zu sein. Die eigentliche Nachricht steht dadurch in einem Anhang. This message was wrapped to be DMARC compliant. The actual message text is therefore in an attachment.--- Begin Message --- On Thursday, 5 October 2023 14:59:40 CEST Diego Zuccato wrote: > Hello all. > > Does someone use FAI to install the base system that will be managed by > Salt? > I'm trying to integrate 'em but there's still something that doesn't > "click"... > > My current idea is to use Salt to orchestrate the install, but maybe > it's better left to FAI? How can I "pass around" minion key so I don't > have to manually re-approve the new key every time? > The ideal scenario would be: target generates its keypair, sends the > pubkey to FAI that "certifies" it's from the system being installed and > passes it to Salt. Should I write a custom fai-monitor (that would be > needed anyway to disable netboot once system is reinstalled)? > > TIA. My solution at the moment is non-interactive. In classes I have a script which asks for username and password for the salt api to save a cookie which is valid for a 30min. Later during the fai installation a script uses the cookie to get the salt key via the salt api. After the first boot salt is doing the rest... Instead of using the non-interactive approach I guess you could also provide the cookie base64 encoded via boot parameter or dhcp. regards Markus -- Markus Koeberl Graz University of Technology Signal Processing and Speech Communication Laboratory E-mail: markus.koeb...@tugraz.at signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. --- End Message ---
Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody?
Hi, I did not read this whole threads, but yes, here we are currently managing a FAI server through SaltStack. It configures pxelinux files and my DHCP server. FAI rootfs installs the SaltStack repository with a script class, and my SaltStack server auto-accept keys from known hostnames through a SaltStack reactor or orchestrator, depending on the machine. When the key is accepted, a highstate is deployed to finish the install when the orchestrator is launched. All my machines configurations are stored on the SaltStack pillars. Those pillars contains the SaltStack minion's name, the hostname, the mac address, the IP address, the boot state and some other useful informations. When a machine is finally installed, the orchestrator change the value "boot" in my pillar corresponding to the machine to "OS" instead of "install" and the value is deployed to the tftp FAI server to changed the pxelinux file like fai-chboot would have done with states tftp and dhcp. When a machine needs to be reinstalled, orchestrator starts by changing its boot state, deploys the tftp state, reboot the machine and removes the key. Then the machine is installed; there is a big timeout in order to wait for the reinstall. Then the machine tries to reconnect to the machine "salt", key is auto-accepted, highstate is deployed, etc.. Problem with the orchestrator is that it is only one machine by one machine, contrary to a fully reactor system. Hope it helps, Best regards, Rémy Le mer. 11 oct. 2023, 13:33, Markus Köberl via linux-fai < linux-fai@uni-koeln.de> a écrit : > Diese Nachricht wurde eingewickelt um DMARC-kompatibel zu sein. Die > eigentliche Nachricht steht dadurch in einem Anhang. > > This message was wrapped to be DMARC compliant. The actual message > text is therefore in an attachment. > > > -- Forwarded message -- > From: "Markus Köberl" > To: linux-fai@uni-koeln.de > Cc: > Bcc: > Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2023 13:32:46 +0200 > Subject: Re: FAI + SaltStack anybody? > On Thursday, 5 October 2023 14:59:40 CEST Diego Zuccato wrote: > > Hello all. > > > > Does someone use FAI to install the base system that will be managed by > > Salt? > > I'm trying to integrate 'em but there's still something that doesn't > > "click"... > > > > My current idea is to use Salt to orchestrate the install, but maybe > > it's better left to FAI? How can I "pass around" minion key so I don't > > have to manually re-approve the new key every time? > > The ideal scenario would be: target generates its keypair, sends the > > pubkey to FAI that "certifies" it's from the system being installed and > > passes it to Salt. Should I write a custom fai-monitor (that would be > > needed anyway to disable netboot once system is reinstalled)? > > > > TIA. > > My solution at the moment is non-interactive. > In classes I have a script which asks for username and password for the > salt > api to save a cookie which is valid for a 30min. > Later during the fai installation a script uses the cookie to get the salt > key > via the salt api. After the first boot salt is doing the rest... > > Instead of using the non-interactive approach I guess you could also > provide > the cookie base64 encoded via boot parameter or dhcp. > > > regards > Markus > -- > Markus Koeberl > Graz University of Technology > Signal Processing and Speech Communication Laboratory > E-mail: markus.koeb...@tugraz.at