Practical experiences from every day IT

Month: October 2026

  • Saltstack not recognizing new branches even if configured and salt-master restarted

    When working with Saltstack, it happens that when adding new branches via the salt-master configuration, the branches do not immediately get picked up. IMHO it is an unpractical flaw, but the people remaining to develop Saltstack may have other opinions or deeper knowledge about the constraints the git backends gitpython and pygit2 may impose.

    I figured two easy options to get the new branches to work immediately:

    Variant 1: Change config, flush the gitfs caches and restart

    systemctl stop salt-master && rm -rf /var/cache/salt/master/gitfs/* && rm -rf /var/cache/salt/master/file_lists/* && systemctl start salt-master

    Variant 2: Change config, restart, commit & push to the new branch, salt-run filesystem.update (or wait for the git update interval)

    systemctl restart salt-master

# Alibi edit something
# git commit -m "Test"
# git push

salt-run fileserver.update # Or wait for the git update interval

    If you run any salt-syndic, apply the same measures there, too.

  • How does an ATA Secure Erase speed up old SATA SSD’s?

    I recently came across an interesting quirk that I had tasked myself with investigating and figuring out. I had a couple older model Samsung SSD’s which, ran in conjunction with a PERC H730 controller. Unfortunately, as soon as the 1GB controller cache was full, they tumbled from their 500 MB/s design limitation (SATA-3, 6 Gbps) down to something like 30-40 MB/s, which is a horrible performance value for that hardware.

    Unaware of the actual reason for this, I started to poke around in the controller, switching between RAID and non-RAID (HBA-mode), retesting, and turning the controller cache on and off. But nothing really helped; they remained slow.

    As part of poking around I they tried a ATA Secure Erase procedure on one of the disks. The procedure requires 2-3 commands and is described excellently in the Thomas Krenn-Wiki.

    (more…)