Installing Salt Engine in Salt Masters, however, the engine is unresponsive

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

Attempting to load or update a custom engine or module, but it is never started by the Salt master

Environment

Aria Config - all versions

SaltProject - all versions

Cause

The cache on the Salt master may have become corrupted in some way and does not detect the new engine as being installed yet.

Resolution

The resolution here is to forcefully refresh the cache on the Salt master and re-sync any modules.

1. Stop the Salt master
2. Run rm -fRv /var/cache/salt/master/extmods
   1. This directory is just a cache directory and will be rebuilt upon synchronization 
3. Run salt-run saltutil.sync_all
   1. If your modules are stored in a specific enviornment, then you may need to add the saltenv=<YOURENV> to sync from an env other than "base"
4. Start your Salt master
5. Confirm that the engine is seen in the Salt master process list
   1. ps -ef | grep -i salt | grep -i <YOUR ENGINE NAME>