Air gap environment preparation

This topic provides guidance for preparing an air-gapped environment and installing an air-gapped environment system for a straightforward installation of Anaconda Server, as detailed in Air gap installation.

On this page:


Preparing the air-gapped environment

Environment requirements

The installer is a self-extracting binary that contains the all the necessary components to run Anaconda Server services. The basic requirements prior to installation are:

Software requirements

  • Any Linux variant capable of supporting Docker

  • Use a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) or Hostname

  • DNS record and TLS/SSL certs

  • Make sure that SELinux is not in enforcing mode, either by disabling it or putting it in permissive mode in the /etc/selinux/config file. If it is in enforcing mode, you will need to reboot your instance after updating. After rebooting, run the following command to verify that SELinux is not being enforced:

    getenforce
# The result should be either Disabled or Permissive
  • For Docker based installations:
  • For Podman based installations:
    • RHEL8
    • Anaconda Server version 6.3.0+
    • Podman version 4.0.2+
    • The podman-compose package must be installed (requires podman-dotenv to be installed first)
    • The podman-plugins package must be installed (For DNS resolution. Docker handles this natively, but Podman does not.)

Hardware requirements

  • 4 CPUs
  • 8GB RAM
  • 1.5TB storage space
    • Conda_air gap zip file is ~700GB
    • CVE zip file is ~20MB

When partitioning space, allocate 20gb for /var/lib and the remaining 1.5TB for /opt/anaconda.

Installing packages and CVE files

Artifact download authorization

In order to pull down the conda packages and CVEs, you will need to provide the IP address of the server you are going to store the packages and CVEs on. This enables us to grant you access to the S3 bucket where we store the packages and CVEs.

Note

This will need to be completed prior to scheduling your implementation with Anaconda. The download will take several hours.

If you prefer not to use a hostname, the public IP address of your environment will be required.

Installing packages and CVEs

In this section, you will install Anaconda Server packages, move those packages to your air-gapped repository, and configure the .env file to point to the location of the CVEs.

Note

Downloading the Anaconda Server Packages may take several hours.

Run the following commands to install the air gap and cve packages:

curl -O https://anaconda-airgap-te.s3.amazonaws.com/conda_main.zip
curl -O https://anaconda-airgap-te.s3.amazonaws.com/conda_msys2.zip
curl -O https://anaconda-airgap-te.s3.amazonaws.com/conda_r.zip
curl -O https://anaconda-airgap-te.s3.amazonaws.com/cve.zip

Caution

Do not unzip the air gap or cve files.

DNS and TLS/SSL certificate requirements

Anaconda Server can use certificates to provide transport layer security for the cluster. It is required to have your TLS/SSL certs prior to installation; otherwise, self-signed certificates can be generated during the initial installation.

You may purchase certificates commercially, use Let’s Encrypt, or generate them using your organization’s internal public key infrastructure (PKI) system. When using an internal PKI-signed setup, the CA certificate is stored on the file system. You will need to make sure the root certificate of your certificate authority is trusted by the server running the application and the workstations used by users of the application.

DNS requirements

Web browsers use domain names and web origins to separate sites, so they cannot tamper with each other. If you want to use DNS, you must have it ready prior to installation. This DNS name is what users will use to access the application.

You must provide the SSL cert for the hostname your Anaconda Server instance is running on.

Security requirements

External Ports

These are ports that allow access outside of the server. It is important to protect all services running on the node from outside access. The exceptions are as shown below. These ports need to be open to allow access to Anaconda Server via browser and (optionally) via SSH:

  • :443 nginx - only if you are using HTTPS
  • :22 ssh - optional; only if you need SSH

Internal Ports

These are ports that allow access within the server and are open on docker containers, exposed only to the docker network. Ideally, Anaconda Server will have a dedicated environment. Anaconda Server uses several ports for internal communication between components. These ports do not need to be open to the end user but they need to be reserved, as some bind to the local host network interfaces.

You can run docker ps and reference the PORTS column, as shown in the following example:

../_images/docker_ps.png

  • :5000 repo - Anaconda Server API
  • :5002 repo-proxy - Anaconda Server file serving API proxy
  • :5000 repo-dispatcher - Anaconda Server event dispatcher/handler (exposed only for prometheus metrics)
  • :5000 repo-worker - Anaconda Server scheduled jobs worker (exposed only for prometheus metrics)
  • :8080 keycloak - keycloak’s /auth/* endpoints are proxied in Nginx
  • :5432 postgres - Postgresql database used by Anaconda Server and Keycloak
  • :6379 redis - Redis instance used by Anaconda Server services
  • :9090 prometheus - Prometheus is proxied in Nginx at /Prometheus

Enable IP address forwarding

Forwarding IP addresses allows containers to communicate with one another on your host. You’ll need to configure these settings to allow non-root users to perform installations of Anaconda Server.

sysctl net.ipv4.conf.all.forwarding=1
sysctl net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT

Installing air-gapped environment system

Install Docker and Docker Compose. Contact your operating system vendor or IT department for assistance with this step.

System validation checks

Once your environment is prepared, run the following commands to verify it is ready for installation of Anaconda Server.

To verify what type of processor your system is running and the number of CPUs present, run the command:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

To verify the amount of system memory is sufficient, run the command:

cat /proc/meminfo

To verify there is a sufficient amount of disk space for the installation, run the command:

df -h

To verify the kernel release version and processor type, run the command:

uname -a

To verify your operating system release version, run the command:

cat /etc/os-release

To verify your version of Docker, run the command:

docker version

To verify your version of docker-compose, run the command:

docker-compose --version

After ensuring all requirements have been met, proceed to Air gap installation to install Anaconda Server in your air-gapped environment.