Peer Communication

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# Peer Communication

Salt 0.9.0 introduced the capability for Salt minions to publish commands. The intent of this feature is not for Salt minions to act as independent brokers one with another, but to allow Salt minions to pass commands to each other.

In Salt 0.10.0 the ability to execute runners from the master was added. This allows for the master to return collective data from runners back to the minions via the peer interface.

The peer interface is configured through two options in the master configuration file. For minions to send commands from the master the `peer` configuration is used. To allow for minions to execute runners from the master the `peer_run` configuration is used.

Since this presents a viable security risk by allowing minions access to the master publisher the capability is turned off by default. The minions can be allowed access to the master publisher on a per minion basis based on regular expressions. Minions with specific ids can be allowed access to certain Salt modules and functions.

## Peer Configuration

The configuration is done under the `peer` setting in the Salt master configuration file, here are a number of configuration possibilities.

The simplest approach is to enable all communication for all minions, this is only recommended for very secure environments.

    peer:
      .*:
        - .*

This configuration will allow minions with IDs ending in example.com access to the test, ps, and pkg module functions.

    peer:
      .*example.com:
        - test.*
        - ps.*
        - pkg.*

The configuration logic is simple, a regular expression is passed for matching minion ids, and then a list of expressions matching minion functions is associated with the named minion. For instance, this configuration will also allow minions ending with foo.org access to the publisher.

    peer:
      .*example.com:
        - test.*
        - ps.*
        - pkg.*
      .*foo.org:
        - test.*
        - ps.*
        - pkg.*

## Peer Runner Communication

Configuration to allow minions to execute runners from the master is done via the `peer_run` option on the master. The `peer_run` configuration follows the same logic as the `peer` option. The only difference is that access is granted to runner modules.

To open up access to all minions to all runners:

    peer_run:
      .*:
        - .*

This configuration will allow minions with IDs ending in example.com access to the manage and jobs runner functions.

    peer_run:
      .*example.com:
        - manage.*
        - jobs.*

## Using Peer Communiction

The publish module was created to manage peer communication. The publish module comes with a number of functions to execute peer communication in different ways. Currently there are three functions in the publish module. These examples will show how to test the peer system via the salt-call command.

To execute test.ping on all minions:

    # salt-call publish.publish \* test.ping

To execute the manage.up runner:

    # salt-call publish.runner manage.up

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