Troubleshooting Salt clients shown as down and DNS settings

Even if the Salt client is running, actions such as package refresh or apply states can be marked as failed with the message:

Minion is down or could not be contacted.

In this case try rescheduling the action. If rescheduling succeeds, the cause of the problem can be a wrong DNS configuration.

To access a shell inside the Server container run mgrctl term on the container host.

When the Salt client is restarted, or in case the grains are refreshed, the client calculates its FQDN grains, and it is unresponsive until the grains are proceeded. When a scheduled action on SUSE Manager Server is going to be executed, SUSE Manager Server performs a test.ping to the client before the actual action to ensure the client is actually running and the action can be triggered.

By default, SUSE Manager Server waits for 5 seconds to get the response from test.ping command. If the response is not received within 5 seconds, then the action is set to fail with the message that the client is down or could not be contacted.

To correct this, fix the DNS resolution on the client, so the client does not get stuck for 5 seconds while solving its FQDN.

If this is not possible, try to increase the value for java.salt_presence_ping_timeout in the /etc/rhn/rhn.conf file on the SUSE Manager Server to a value higher than 4.

For example:

mgrctl term
vim /etc/rhn/rhn.conf
java.salt_presence_ping_timeout = 6

After that, run:

mgradm restart

Increasing this value will cause SUSE Manager Server to take longer to check if a minion is unreachable or unresponsive, causing the SUSE Manager Server to be slower or less responsive overall.