Way to reset minion-id after changing MAC address (cRIO in VM clone related)

[andre.buurman@carya]

Hi,

Is there a way to reset/renew the salt minion-id?

I'm experimenting with cRIOs in a virtual machine and I found that the cloned VM has the same minion-id as the source.

Somehow right after my SystemLink server became unreachable (possibly because a clone system tried to connect using an already existing minion-id). Had to repair (resets all web server configuration, needs to be reconfigured) my SystemLink server install (because I didn't know what else to do) to get it in a working state again.

[JoshuaP · Accepted solution]

If you clone a system, I would suggest deleting the following afterwards and then reboot the system.

• /etc/salt/minion_id
• /etc/salt/pki/minion/*.*
• /etc/natinst/niskyline/*.*

The minion_id will automatically be recreated on the next boot.  

[andre.buurman@carya]

Thinking about the cloning, if I would image a SystemLink connected cRIO (HW) with RAD utility and deploy it to a new cRIO.

Would that newly imaged system then have the same minion ID?

Could that pose any problems?

Would it be necessary to disconnect the cRIO from SystemLink, create an image, image the new cRIO, recreate the minion ID, reconnect both cRIOs to the SystemLink server?

Could duplicate minion ID for different cRIOs hang the SystemLink server?

[JoshuaP]

It depends on the version of firmware you are running on your target.  If you have Firmware/Safe-mode 8.0 or higher (NI CompactRIO 20.0+) it should automatically exclude the minion_id.  If your target is running an older version of firmware then you will need to add those files and folders to the exclude list in RAD when you create and deploy the image.

Duplicate minion ID can create lots of problems and make it impossible to deploy software to all of them.  All the systems with duplicate IDs will show up as one system in SL and they will take turns over writing each others data.

[andre.buurman@carya]

Hi Joshua,

This is very valuable information. Thanks.

Could you make sure this ends up in the product manual?

For me (and likely others) it is a very common workflow to create multiple instances of a measurement device.

I can imagine if we get used to using states to replicate to a new system we won't have that problem.