Salt masters are not connected to Aria Config GUI and salt-minion deployments are failing

Products

• VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)
• VMware SaltStack

Issue/Introduction

• Salt masters are not shown in the Master Plugin or Minion Keys sections of the Aria Config GUI
• Running salt-key on this salt-master gives the normal output, but also displays errors about file permissions
• The user: option of the master config is set to a user other than root
  • For example,  user: salt
• automated salt-minion deployments from Aria Automation or salt-cloud deployments fail with permission error:
  

  return: Exception occurred in runner deploy.minion: Traceback (most recent call last): 
  File "/opt/saltstack/salt/lib/python3.10/site-packages/salt/client/mixins.py", line 388, in low data["return"] = func(*args, **kwargs) 
  File "/opt/saltstack/salt/lib/python3.10/site-packages/salt/loader/lazy.py", line 149, in __call__ return self.loader.run(run_func, *args, **kwargs) 
  File "/opt/saltstack/salt/lib/python3.10/site-packages/salt/loader/lazy.py", line 1232, in run return self._last_context.run(self._run_as, _func_or_method, *args, **kwargs) 
  File "/opt/saltstack/salt/lib/python3.10/site-packages/salt/loader/lazy.py", line 1247, in _run_as return _func_or_method(*args, **kwargs) 
  File "/opt/saltstack/salt/lib/python3.10/site-packages//sseape/runners/deploy.py", line 645, in minion provider_dir, profile_dir, deploy_dir, temp_dir = _init_cloud_dirs() 
  File "/opt/saltstack/salt/lib/python3.10/site-packages//sseape/runners/deploy.py", line 392, in _init_cloud_dirs cloud_temp_dir = _ensure_cloud_temp_dir() 
  File "/opt/saltstack/salt/lib/python3.10/site-packages//sseape/runners/deploy.py", line 103, in _ensure_cloud_temp_dir os.makedirs(name=cloud_temp_dir, mode=0o700, exist_ok=True) 
  File "/opt/saltstack/salt/lib/python3.10/os.py", line 225, in makedirs mkdir(name, mode) PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/etc/salt/cloud.deploy.d/.salt-########-####-####-####-############'

Environment

• Aria Automation Config
• Tanzu Guardrails for Workloads

Cause

The Salt master must be run as root for use in Aria Automation Config (SaltStack enterprise) setups:

TechDocs: Install and configure the Master Plugin

• Note: The Salt master must be run as root.

Resolution

• Include the user: root option in the salt-master configuration, or remove it as this is the default
  • Salt docs: Configuring the Salt Master
• You can change the owner to root across the relevant directories:
  • chown -R root:root /etc/salt /var/cache/salt /var/log/salt /var/run/salt