Error "Package dctrl-tools is not installed" when installing Salt Minion on an offline Ubuntu machine in VMware Cloud Foundation Salt

Products

• VMware Salt

Issue/Introduction

• Attempting to install the Salt Minion (salt-minion) .deb package on an offline (dark site) Ubuntu virtual machine (e.g., Ubuntu 26.04).

• The installation fails and outputs a dependency error similar to the following:

  Package dctrl-tools is not installed.

Environment

VMware Cloud Foundation Salt 8.18.x

Cause

This is expected behavior for an offline environment. The operating system lacks internet access, preventing the package manager from automatically contacting external repositories to resolve and download the missing dependency tree.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, the missing .deb dependencies must be downloaded manually and installed locally on the offline machine.

Step 1: Download missing dependencies

On a separate Ubuntu machine that has internet access, download the required .deb files for your architecture (e.g., amd64). The required packages are dctrl-tools, dpkg-dev, libdpkg-perl, make, and bzip2.

Run the following command:

apt-get download dctrl-tools dpkg-dev libdpkg-perl make bzip2

Alternatively, you can download the packages directly from the Ubuntu archives using a web browser:

• bzip2

• dctrl-tools

• dpkg-dev

• libdpkg-perl

• make

Step 2: Transfer the files to the offline machine

Transfer the downloaded .deb files to the offline (dark site) machine. Place them in a dedicated directory alongside your Salt packages (for example, /tmp/packages/).

Step 3: Install the prerequisites locally

To allow dpkg to resolve the dependency tree locally without internet access, install all the packages simultaneously within the same directory.

Navigate to the directory and run the following command:

dpkg -i *.deb

Step 4: Retry Salt Minion installation

Once the prerequisite packages are installed successfully, retry installing the salt-minion package.

Additional Information

Salt and the Salt services require various packages to be present in order to run effectively. If you host your own custom-built repository of Salt, you must also ensure these packages are present in the repository. For example, if your system is air-gapped and uses a minimal repository, these packages must be present in order for the Salt services to run correctly.

The following lists the package dependencies for each operating system for onedir packages:

Salt Install Dependencies