Saturday, October 10, 2015

xfce - drag application to panel

So you have a fresh desktop install with Xfce

Perhaps you wanted the default panel setup, or maybe not.

With a single blank panel, you need to use panel preferences by right clicking on any panel to add some more.

But blank panels are no use - drag and drop applications?

You probably already have xfce4-appfinder installed as part of Xfce desktop


Running xfce4-appfinder (Alt+F3) will bring up a selection menu from which you can drag and drop items to the panel.




The drag and drop process is not flawless and if when you get your item to the panel it does not have a '+' symbol, then it will drop into the ether rather than fixing to the panel.

( If you do not see '+' symbol then have the item drag off the panel and then move it back on before dropping )

Successful drop onto the panel results in a brief dialogue box confirmation and selecting 'Create Launcher' will complete the job.



Once you have setup a few panels on a home desktop it is pretty quick to repeat the process.
You should be able to do similar on your laptop with less than 5 minutes extra work.

You desktop might stay unchanged for a couple of years and so investing 15 minutes total in a couple of setups is worthwhile.

Saturday, October 3, 2015

Saltstack salt-ssh - getting started

When first experimenting with salt-ssh, you might be feeling your way around and encounter some of these issues.

Proper reading of the documentation and understanding of how salt-ssh operates with rosters will avoid some of those listed, but I describe them below anyway.

Fault 1: Permission denied: '/etc/salt/pki/master/ssh'


Try running salt-ssh on the local machine as root


Fault 2: Tabs in roster file


Although roster file does not have a file extension indicating it is Yaml, it is parsed as Yaml by Salt

Remove any tabs


Fault 3: missing /etc/salt/pki/master/ssh/salt-ssh.rsa


Until you have run salt-ssh as root,
the necessary files in /etc/salt/pki/master/ssh will not be generated

Run as root on local machine to initialise


Fault 4: remote host has not got salt-ssh.rsa.pub in its authorized_keys


/usr/bin/ssh-copy-id -i /etc/salt/pki/master/ssh/salt-ssh.rsa.pub someuser@box


Fault 5: /usr/bin/ssh-copy-id: ERROR: No identities found


You are probably trying to copy the salt-ssh private key (denied) rather than the public key (likely 644 permission)

Fault 6: IOErrors reported for remote host for directories in following list:

  • /etc/salt
  • /var/cache/salt
  • /var/log/salt
roster file for the unprivileged user should be changed to sudo: True
When the connection at the remote end is instructed to use sudo (as shown above) then those 3 directories will be initiated properly on the remote host



Fault 7:  [CRITICAL] Unable to import msgpack or msgpack_pure python modules


This error message is often associated with IOError described in Fault 6. Once the remote directories are created and there are no more reports of IOError, then this import message should also disappear



Fault 8: unprivileged user on remote does not have enough sudo powers


%saltpepper   ALL=NOPASSWD:ALL

And then add the unprivileged user to group saltpepper (or whatever you preferred group for controlling sudo is)


Example of invoking file.find on remote host via salt-ssh





( This article is not a general guide to Saltstack. Please comment or pingback by all means, but only comments directly related to salt-ssh will be read or published. )