The System Admin Toolkit (SAT) is designed to assist administrators with common tasks, such as troubleshooting and querying information about the HPE Cray EX System and its components, system boot and shutdown, and replacing hardware components.
The System Admin Toolkit (SAT) provides a command-line utility called sat that can be run from
Kubernetes control plane nodes (ncn-m nodes). The sat command-line utility is organized into
multiple subcommands that perform different administrative tasks. For example, sat status provides
a summary of the status of the components in the system while sat bootprep provides a way to
create CFS configurations, IMS images, and session templates to prepare for booting the system. For
more information on the available SAT commands, see SAT Command Overview.
Most sat subcommands depend on services or components from other products in the HPE Cray EX software stack.
For more details, refer to the SAT Dependencies.
In CSM 1.3 and newer, the sat command is automatically available on all the Kubernetes control
plane nodes. For more information, see SAT in CSM. Older versions of CSM do not
have the sat command automatically available, and SAT must be installed as a separate product.
The sat command-line utility runs in a container using Podman, a daemonless container runtime. SAT
runs on Kubernetes control plane nodes. A few important points about the SAT container environment
include the following:
sat or sat bash always launches a container.There are two ways to run sat.
sat bash, followed by a sat command.sat command directly on a Kubernetes control plane node.In both of these cases, a container is launched in the background to execute the command. The first
option, running sat bash first, gives an interactive shell, at which point sat commands can be
run. In the second option, the container is launched, executes the command, and upon the command’s
completion the container exits. The following two examples show the same action, checking the system
status, using both modes.
(ncn-m001#) Here is an example using interactive mode:
sat bash
((CONTAINER_ID) sat-container#) Example sat command after a container is launched:
sat status
(ncn-m001#) Here is an example using non-interactive mode:
sat status
Running sat using the interactive command prompt gives the ability to read and write local files
on ephemeral container storage. If multiple sat commands are being run in succession, use sat bash to launch the container beforehand. This will save time because the container does not need to
be launched for each sat command.
The non-interactive mode is useful if calling sat with a script, or when running a single sat
command as a part of several steps that need to be executed from a management NCN.
A man page describing the SAT container environment is available on the Kubernetes control plane
nodes, which can be viewed either with man sat or man sat-podman from the manager node.
Note that this is only the man page for the SAT container environment, not for the actual sat
commands which can be used to perform system administration tasks. See
SAT Man Pages for instructions on accessing those man pages.
Either of the following options work to view the man page for the SAT container environment.
(ncn-m#) View the man page for the SAT container environment:
man sat
(ncn-m#) View the man page for the SAT container environment using its long name:
man sat-podman
To view a sat man page from a Kubernetes control plane node, use sat-man on the manager node or
use man within a shell in the SAT container started by sat bash.
The top-level sat man page describes the command-line interface, documents the global options
affecting all subcommands, documents configuration file options, and refers to the man pages for
each subcommand. Each of these subcommands have their own options documented in their individual man
pages.
See the following examples showing how to view sat man pages directly on a manager node using
sat-man.
(ncn-m#) View the top-level sat man page:
sat-man sat
(ncn-m#) View the man page for the sat status subcommand:
sat-man sat-status
See the following examples showing how to view sat man pages within the shell in the SAT container
started by sat bash.
((CONTAINER_ID) sat-container#) View the top-level sat man page:
man sat
((CONTAINER_ID) sat-container#) View the man page for the sat status subcommand:
man sat-status