Getting Started for Hackers

You want to use your own hardware or a virtual machine? You’re at the right place! If you just want to use the CloudFleet Blimp, better go here instead.

TODO: quickest possible way to get started for hackers, with any potential side-stories being linked to elsewhere in the docs.

Assuming Raspberry Pi 2 (dm-crypt modules for the Cubox not set up automatically)

Order a CloudFleet service subscription

Go to https://cloudfleet.io/, fill out your domain info.

TODO: allow the upload of a OTP (or allow downloading of a random OTP and allow for e.g. a device labeled cf-otp to be plugged into the blimp on the first boot and use that instead of the mac address)

Set up your domain’s DNS

TODO: make option to “use your own existing domain”

Maybe also move this to another page as an optional route “CloudFleet with your own domain”

Steps to set up a custom domain with a new Cubox:

• register a domain (e.g. Namecheap)

• point your blimp. DNS to CloudFleet’s Pagekite frontend (the . in the end may or may not be necessary depending on your registrar)

   <type>  <host>  <value>
   CNAME   blimp   myblimp.net.
  

• point your domain’s MX record to cloudfleet.cloudfleet.io

   <type>  <host>  <value>                     <priority>
   MX      @       cloudfleet.cloudfleet.io.   1
  

Prepare the Blimp’s SD card

TODO: Explain how to burn the “golden image”.

If you want to setup everything on a Debian Linux from scratch (for transparency or you maybe want to use an existing server), follow the detailed explanation of how to run Ansible playbooks to install everything.

TODO: add the OTP somehow

Prepare the key and storage USB devices

In the blimp repository, in the scripts folder is a script to format two USB devices with correct labels. It expects a key device path (e.g. /dev/sda) and a storage device path (e.g. /dev/sdb) Warning: running this script on the provided devices will erase all data on them. Be sure to back up everything important!

In Linux, run:

./scripts/format_usbs.sh <key device> <storage device>

<key device> and <storage device> refer to the block level storage devices (e.g. /dev/sda/) not partitions (e.g. /dev/sda1). If one has mounted filesystems from these devices at the runtime of the format_usbs.sh script it will fail. For example, the following script umount all filesystems from the /dev/sda device:

for fs in $(mount -l | grep /dev/sda | awk -e '{print $1}'); do umount $fs; done

Plug the USB devices into the device.

(on the next reboot the devices will be set up for our LUKS encrypted partition scheme)

This script is also available on the Blimp itself (if you ssh into it) and can be run as:

/opt/cloudfleet/engineroom/bin/cryptpart/wipe_disks.sh <key device> <storage device>

(typically, on the blimp, the 1st USB you plug in will be /dev/sda and the 2nd /dev/sdb, to help you visually distinguish them)