Working with dunders

For those of you not in the know, dunder refers to a variable that is preceded and succeeded by two underscores. For instance, one of the most common dunders in Salt is __opts__, which contains the configuration for either the Master or the Minion, depending on the context. There are a number of dunders that work together to form the glue that ties all of Salt together. Let's take a look at them in turn:

• __opts__: On a Master, the __opts__ dictionary contains a composite of the information located in the Master's configuration files (normally /etc/salt/master plus files located in the /etc/salt/master.d/ directory), along with the default values for configuration parameters not specified, plus any internal configuration that Salt generates for its own use at runtime.

  On a Minion, __opts__ contains the same sort of information (but from the /etc/salt/minion file and the /etc/salt/minion.d/ directory), when it is connected to the Master. However, when the Minion...