SSH Push Contact Method

SSH Push (ssh-push) is used in environments where Salt clients cannot reach the SUSE Manager Server directly. In this environment, clients are located in a firewall-protected zone called a DMZ. No system within the DMZ is authorized to open a connection to the internal network where the SUSE Manager Server is located.

SSH Push is also to use if installing a daemon agent on clients is not possible.

The SSH Push method has serious limitations. It does not scale well, and consumes more Server resources and network bandwidth than the plain Salt method (default). The Push SSH method is not at all supported with large setups (1000 clients and more).

The server uses the SSH Push to contact the clients at regular intervals, checking in and performing scheduled actions and events.

Re-installing systems using the provisioning model is not currently supported on clients managed with SSH Push.

This image demonstrates the SSH Push process path. All items left of the Taskomatic block represent processes running on the SUSE Manager client.

salt ssh contact taigon

To use SSH Push, you must have the SSH daemon running on the client, and reachable by the salt-api daemon running on the SUSE Manager Server. Additionally, the required Python version will be deployed with the Salt Bundle on the client system.

Before beginning with the following registering procedure, define an activation key with the SSH Push contact method configured. This method expects that there is a direct connection with HTTPS to the Server.

You need to use the Web UI or API to register these clients with the SUSE Manager Server. See the following procedure or example.

Procedure: Registering clients with SSH Push

  1. In the SUSE Manager Web UI, navigate to Systems  Bootstrapping and complete the appropriate fields.

  2. Select an activation key with the SSH Push contact method configured. For more information about activation keys, see Activation Keys.

  3. Check the Manage system completely via SSH checkbox.

  4. Click Bootstrap to begin registration.

  5. Confirm that the system has been registered correctly by navigating to Systems  Overview.

Example: API Access to Push via SSH

You can use the API to manage which contact method to use. This example Python code sets the contact method to ssh-push.

Valid values are:

  • default (pull)

  • ssh-push

  • ssh-push-tunnel

client = xmlrpclib.Server(SUMA_HOST + "/rpc/api", verbose=0)
key = client.auth.login(SUMA_LOGIN, SUMA_PASSWORD)
client.system.setDetails(key, 1000012345, {'contact_method' : 'ssh-push'})

1. Available parameters

When you are configuring SSH Push, you can modify parameters that are used when a system is registered, including the host, activation key, and password. The password is used only for bootstrapping, it is not saved anywhere. All future SSH sessions are authorized via a key/certificate pair. These parameters are configured in Systems  Bootstrapping.

You can also configure persistent parameters that are used system-wide, including the sudo user to access the system as an unprivileged user instead of as root.

Procedure: Configuring unprivileged SSH access

  1. Ensure you have the latest spacewalk-taskomatic and spacewalk-certs-tools packages installed on the SUSE Manager Server.

  2. On each client system, create an appropriate unprivileged user.

  3. On each client system, edit the sudoers file:

    sudo visudo

  4. Grant sudo access to the user by adding this line at the end of the sudoers file. Replace <user> with the name of the user that is bootstrapping the client in the Web UI:

    <user>  ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/python3, /var/tmp/venv-salt-minion/bin/python

    This procedure grants root access without requiring a password, which is required for registering the client. When the client is successfully installed it runs with root privileges, so the access is no longer required. We recommend that you remove the line from the sudoers file after the client has been successfully installed.

  5. On the SUSE Manager Server, in the /etc/rhn/rhn.conf configuration file, add or amend this line to include the unprivileged username:

    ssh_push_sudo_user = <user>

After changing this configuration parameter you must restart services such as salt-secrets-config.service, tomcat.service, and taskomatic.service. To cover all needed services, it is the best to restart the SUSE Manager Server as root:

mgradm restart

2. Action Execution

The SSH Push feature uses taskomatic to execute scheduled actions using salt-ssh. The taskomatic job periodically checks for scheduled actions and executes them. The SSH Push feature executes a complete salt-ssh call based on the scheduled action.

By default, twenty Salt SSH actions can be executed at a time. You can increase the number of actions that can be executed in parallel, by adding these lines to your configuration file, and adjusting the value of parallel_threads upwards. We recommend you keep the number of parallel actions low, to avoid problems:

taskomatic.sshminion_action_executor.parallel_threads = <number>
org.quartz.threadPool.threadCount = <value of parallel_threads + 20>

This adjusts the number of actions that can run in parallel on any one client and the total number of worker threads used by taskomatic. If actions needs to be run on multiple clients, actions are always executed sequentially on each client.

If the clients are connected through a proxy, you need to adjust the MaxSessions settings on the proxy. In this case, set the number of parallel connections to be three times the total number of clients.

3. Future features

There are some features that are not yet supported on SSH Push. These features do not work on Salt SSH clients:

  • OpenSCAP auditing

  • Beacons, resulting in:

    • Installing a package on a system using zypper does not invoke the package refresh.

    • Virtual Host functions (for example, a host to guests) does not work if the virtual host system is Salt SSH-based.

3.1. For more information