Installation

Translations: ru

First, please think twice before installing. Do you really need it ?

There isn’t much information about Umbrella Linux right now. The chances are that you do not know what you are doing. In this case stop ! Talk to somebody, who can explain things to you (IRL or via the Internet), or wait until this site contains more information.

The best way to try the Umbrella Linux is to install it into a VirtualBox virtual machine.

  1. Download the Ubuntu 22.04 “Jammy” server installation image and save it to your hard drive.

  2. Create the Virtual Machine (VM) for Umbrella Server to live in. For a typical bare installation (with almost no space for user home directories or mail) you will need a VM with 15Gb of hard drive, 4Gb RAM and a couple of virtual CPUs.

    When installing into VirtualBox with bridged network adapter, please ensure that its promiscous mode is allowed.

    Optional: it can also be a good idea to have a secondary network card on your Umbrella Server (or the Virtualbox VM) to connect the local network (containing workstations and terminals). Without the secondary network card (or other means to connect to the “pub” bridge) you will only be able to access your new system as if you are outside of it.

  3. Load the installation image into the virtual CD drive of the VM, boot and install the Ubuntu Server with minimal settings (no optional software). Create some temporary user with a simple password.

  4. After the installation is finished, log in as a temporary user you have created. Use the sudo -i command to become root and download all the files from this web directory to your root’s home ( e.g. with wget -e robots=off -R 'index.html*' -r -np -nd -nc -l 1 https://metlov.github.io/umbrella-linux/installer/ ). These are all simple text files and ./umbrella-install is a bash script, please chmod +x ./umbrella-install after downloading. If you wish to generate unique passwords and certificates for your system (it is necessary, for example, if you change the system name or location in umbrella.xml) – delete the umbrella_keys.xml file (it will be recreated by the installer with your own settings). Do not install any additional packages at this point (may be except gpm, mc and aptitude).

  5. Review the *.xml files and alter the settings there. You may want to check the name of vmhost (must coincide with the name of the Ubuntu system, used for installation), the definition of the extif on router (the IP and gatewey addresses) to ensure it correspond to the external network parameters, reported by ip addr and ip route. It is important that in umbrella.xml the router gets its external interface’s MAC set to the real MAC of the external interface of the server (check with ip addr). The external interface of the vmhost in umbrella.xml then can be set to an arbitrary free MAC.

Since there is no documentation yet, it is best to consult somebody if you want to do some non-trivial changes.

  1. Run the “./umbrella-install” script you’ve also downloaded on the previous step. It should do everything automatically. It may take several hours to complete depending on the speed of your hard drive. Ejoy your new Umbrella Linux system !

What to do next ?

With the help of VirtualBox you can NAT some port (say 10022) to the port 22 of the first interface of the VM to be able to connect to it. You can log in as a first admin user, specified in umbrella.xml with a simple password, communicated to you at the end of the installation process. Then you can either connect via ssh or via X2Go client (be sure to select “Custom desktop” in sesion type and type there umbrella-session). From the graphical session you can visit https://config.<your-domain>/ in a browser for Fusion Directory interface to your users, groups and workstations. Then you can connect a NAT or Internal VirtualBox network as a secondary interface of the Umbrella Server VM, create a couple of workstation VMs on this network, register their MAC addresses in Fusion Directory and try to boot them via PXE to try terminal mode and local workstation installation.

A more detailed form of these instructions lives in Documentation/installer/README file in Umbrella Linux git or in the actual configuration of your Umbrella Linux cluster on its configuration server (config by default) in the directory /var/lib/bcfg2.