Posts

Showing posts from December, 2017

Configuration Management with Salt Stack on Windows - Part 2 - Configuring Salt Minion with Vagrant

Image
This is part two of a series of basic configuration management for Saltstack for use in an Windows environment. In this guide we'll be covering the basics of setting up Salt Stack Windows minion on a test machine on Vagrant. Part 3 we will be diving into the meat and pushing some buttons automatically with the Salt Master. In order to create a test minion, we'll be using a Windows Server 2012 R2 vagrant image. https://app.vagrantup.com/mwrock/boxes/Windows2012R2 vagrant init mwrock/Windows2012R2 vagrant up  Once the machine is online you can login with vagrant / vagrant. The download for the salt minion can be found on https://repo.saltstack.com/#windows Or the direct link: https://repo.saltstack.com/windows/Salt-Minion-2017.7.2-Py2-AMD64-Setup.exe The Windows installer is straightforward - just enter the Master IP or Hostname for the Salt server. We're not going over the internet, so I entered the Private IP. If you use the default "hostname"

Configuration Management with Salt Stack on Windows - Part 1 - Installing Salt Stack Server with Vagrant

Image
This is part one of a series of basic configuration management for Saltstack for use in an Windows environment. In this guide we'll be covering the basics of setting up Salt Stack Server with a test machine on Vagrant. It's important to note that the "master" server of Salt must be run on a Linux sever, with their being support for a ton of different operating systems as minions. Part 2 will descibe setting up a Windows minion. We'll be grabbing the recently updated generic Ubuntu 16.04 vagrant box as a starting point https://app.vagrantup.com/generic/boxes/ubuntu1604 Run the following commands to start this box: vagrant init generic/ubuntu1604 vagrant up Once the server is setup, you can SSH into the Linux server and login with vagrant with the password of vagrant . Using the bootstrap script, you can easily provision the Salt Master server https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/tutorials/salt_bootstrap.html#salt-bootstrap There are a t

Configuration Management with Salt Stack on Windows - Part 0

Image
This is the first foray into Configuration Management on Windows with Salt Stack. With Configuration management on Windows, I feel as the more I am getting ramped up on working with a development team, the more I understand the need for measurable, consistent and scripted changes. I am looking for the following things: Centralized management over the public Internet Reasonable cost per machine OR the ability to use the community / free edition for my tasks. Ability to work well with Windows IIS configuration Registry / File & User management Patch status evaluation and configuration Low agent footprint. I stumbled upon SaltStack after a co-worker recommended it. I had a hard time finding specific information related to my use case, but I dug into watching the following presentation. I'll be honest, after watching, I was completely lost - but it seemed like I was on the right path, so I thought I'd dig in. With the following series, I'll be digg

How to update Expired VSTS Service Principal Keys in AzureRM portal

Image
If the service principal expires you may need to update the expiration by creating a new key.  In Visual Studio Team Services, the following error may be logged if the Service Principal key is expired:   Failed to check the resource group status. Error: Could not fetch access token for azure. Status code: 401, status message: Unauthorized. To fix, we can create a new key:   Login to the Azure portal: https://portal.azure.com Select Azure Active Directory   Select App Registrations from the sidebar   Search for the Service Principal Client ID – that has expir