Saltstack – OSSEC state using reactor

After concentrating on learning Salt over the last few weeks I have been constantly surprised by how simple yet powerful the system is. When I first began, I started by setting up my base configurations (users, iptables, ssh, etc) into states and as I progressed things began getting more and more sophisticated. For the most part everything has been completely smooth but as with learning anything new I have gotten stuck from time to time trying to figure out how to do something or troubleshooting a formatting error I introduced. Luckily with such a great and active community as well …

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Saltstack: IPTABLES State

One of the first things I needed to get a handle on when I began to use Saltstack was pillar and the various YAML and JINJA formatting techniques. At the time of this writing I didnt see too many beginning to end examples so I thought I would start writing about how I am implementing Saltstack. My intent is to build on this example and end up with a modular deployment using Pillar to manage all the aspects of my infrastructure. In the following example I will create an ipsec state that we can use to dynamically open ports for …

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Saltstack: Master Setup

What can I say about Saltstack but, WOW! After only using it a couple of days I already have a working CM implementation and not only is it easy to use and incredibly powerful but it is FAST! This is not to say I still dont want to spend more time with Chef but after using Saltstack I find it very hard to peel myself away! As with anything I enjoy I thought it would be a good idea to build out some walkthrough’s for my own reference as well as to help anyone else getting started. To begin I thought I would …

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Chef: Workstation Quick Setup

While there are plenty of Chef tutorials out there I still found myself hunting around for one or two things when setting up my environment so I decided to write this article… Well, it is also for my own selfish reasons as writing these doc’s help to ensure that I learn and provide a reference when I need to set things up again. So! I have been getting started with Chef for configuration management and after building a local server or using Opscode hosted chef you will need to setup your workstation for knife and create a repository to store …

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