Salting your LXC Container Fleet
Saltstack is an awesome configuration management system that can make managing 10 to 10,000 servers very simple. Salt can be used to deploy, manage, configure, report around, and even troubleshoot all of your servers. It can also be used to manage a fleet of LXC containers which we will be doing in this blog post. If you have been reading this blog, you know that I love Linux Containers. I am using them for pretty much anything these days. Salt is a great way to keep track of and manage all of these containers. On my main server, I have three containers that are running various applications. In order to update the packages on these containers I would have to log into each one, and run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. This is not so bad for three containers, but you can imagine how annoying and cumbersome this gets as your container lists grows. This is where salt comes to the rescue, with salt I can update all of these containers with a single command. The official Salt Walkthrough is a great place to start to learn about how Salt works. This short post will show you how to set up a small salt configuration on a single server that is hosting several containers. All of my containers are pretty boring because they run Ubuntu 14.04. The best part about salt is that it is really OS agnostic and can manage a diverse fleet of different versions and types of operating systems. For this post, my host and all of my LXC containers are running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Salt works by having a master that manages a bunch of minions. Setting up salt master is a breeze. For the purpose of this blog post, we refer to the master as being your host server and the minions as being your LXC containers.
Setting up Salt Master
On your host server you will need to install salt master. First we will need to add the saltstack repo to our repository list:sudo add-apt-repository ppa:saltstack/salt
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install salt-master
netstat -plntu | grep python
to see which port(s) it is currently running on.
Setting up your Firewall
One thing I ran into during the installation was getting the firewall working. This is all running on a Linode, and I used Linode’s Securing Your Server guide to set up my firewall. If you have a similar setup you can add the following lines to /etc/iptables.firewall.rules to allow the minions to communicate with the master.# Allow Minions from these networks -I INPUT -s 10.0.3.0/24 -p tcp -m multiport --dports 4505,4506 -j ACCEPTAllow Salt to communicate with Master on the loopback interface
-A INPUT -i lo -p tcp -m multiport –dports 4505,4506 -j ACCEPT
Reject everything else
-A INPUT -p tcp -m multiport –dports 4505,4506 -j REJECT
sudo iptables-restore < /etc/iptables.firewall.rules
Setting up your Minions
Once your master is set up, running, and allows minions through the firewall we can set up the minions. Since LXC is a pretty barebones system we will need to install a couple of prerequisites first to get everything working. First we want to log into our container. I usually run the containers in a screen session so it would look something like this.screen -dRR container1 lxc-attach -n container1
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common sudo add-apt-repository ppa:saltstack/salt sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install salt-minion
/etc/hosts
configuration. If you are not sure what the IP address of the master is you can run ip a | grep inet
on the master and look for the IP address that starts with a 10.
vim /etc/hosts # Now add the master IP 10.0.3.1 salt
/etc/init.d/salt-minion start
salt-key -A
in order to accept the key from your minion. You should see the name of your container pop up and you will want to say ‘Y’ to accept its key. You can test to see that everything is working by running:
salt '*' test.ping
hci: True git: True usel: True
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain from mtlynch.io
- Skip the Next iPhone from Articles on Jose M.
- Have smart glasses finally hit an inflection point? from The Torment Nexus
- The McPhee method from the jsomers.net blog
- Pluralistic: LLMs are slot-machines (16 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- The Futzing Fraction from Deciphering Glyph
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Who Is The Sky? by David Byrne
Seeing David Byrne last night for the first-ever performance of Who Is The Sky was one of the best and most impactful concerts/experiences of my life.
via Blog – Brad Frost September 17, 2025Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism's causal chain (17 Sep 2025)
Today's links Conspiratorialism's causal chain: A four-part begat. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Legal threats over HDCP leaks; Print your own TSA luggage keys; "A Natural History of Empty Lots." Upcoming appe…
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow September 17, 2025Theatre Review: Interview (Understudy Performance) ★★★☆☆
One of the best things about London theatre is that once in a while a show will give its understudies a chance to break out of the dressing room and soar on the stage. It's a chance to see talented performers at a discount price. What's not to lik…
via Terence Eden’s Blog September 17, 2025Generated by openring