Salt master does nothing when executing a state.highstate

In my case, it seems to have been a bug as described here: http://ift.tt/1zLJNjK

I could see errors in /var/log/salt/master that looked like this:

Received function _ext_nodes which is unavailable on the master, returning False

I did have a few minions that were on 2014.1.4 while my master was on 2014.1.5.

The fix described in the above post is to effectively just paste in a dummy function by that name:

find where the file master.py is and then inside that (there may be 2, so search for the one applicable here), insert the following just above “def _master_opts”:

def _ext_nodes(self, load):

”’

Stub out until 2014.1.5 minion installed

”’

return {}