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.

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Preparing the air-gapped environment

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Hardware requirements

  • CPU - 4 cores
  • 16GB RAM
  • 1.5TB storage space
    • Conda_air gap zip file is ~1.1TB
    • CVE zip file is ~100MB
When partitioning space, allocate 20GB for /var/lib and the remaining 1.5TB for /opt/anaconda.

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Software requirements

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

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Downloading packages and CVE files

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Artifact download authorization

Anaconda supplies air-gapped customers with our repository in the form of tarball files. In order to gain access to the tarball files that contain the conda packages and CVEs, you must provide Anaconda with the IP address of the machine you are using to download them. Speak with your Anaconda implementation team member to get help allowlisting your IP address.
This must be completed prior to scheduling your implementation with Anaconda. The download may take several hours.
If you prefer not to use a hostname, the public IP address of your environment will be required.

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Downloading packages and CVEs

In this section, you will download Anaconda Server packages and CVEs.
Downloading Anaconda Server Packages may take several hours.
Choose a set of commands to download the Anaconda repository and cve packages:
Do not unzip the tarball files you’ve downloaded.

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Validating Packages and CVEs

To ensure that the files you’ve downloaded have not been tampered with, you must verify the integrity of the .zip files by running some commands to generate their SHA-256 cryptographic hashes (or “checksums”) and the cryptographic hashes for their corresponding .sha256 files, then checking the output to be sure they match. Choose a set of commands that corresponds with your setup:

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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. 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.

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Security requirements

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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

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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:
  • :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

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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

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System validation checks

Once your environment is prepared, run the following commands to verify it is ready for installation of Anaconda Server.
After ensuring all requirements have been met, proceed to Air gap installation to install Anaconda Server in your air-gapped environment.