USENIX LISA Labs 2018

Getting Started

Welcome to Labs. Each of the labs has a VirtualBox VM for your conviencence. Once you've joined the labs network, you can download the files from our webserver.

Note: I've had some difficulty getting port forwarding and VM/Internet connectivity working correctly with the Virtual Box OSE 4.3. I'd recommend using the Oracle packages if you encounter problems.

Import the VM into VirtualBox

Once you've downloaded the zip file containing the VirtualBox files for the lab you're pursing, unzip them using your preferred method.

Next, open the LABNAME.vbox file, eg. docker.vbox and it will open VirtualBox and import the VM for you. You can start the VM by selecting it and then clicking Start.

Configure Networking for VirtualBox

VirtualBox offers several networking options. In order to make the followup lab easier we will use the same network type for all sections. This will require us to make some initial network configuration changes to use the NAT Network network type.

Note: VirtualBox offers two similarly named network types, NAT and NAT Network. The default NAT network type allows VMs to access the Internet, but not address other VMs. The NAT Network network option we're using will allow our VMs to connect both to the Internet and be addressable by other VMs we'll run in the "HA with InfluxDB" lab.

We configure the NAT Network as follows:

1. In the VirtualBox main window, click on File, then Preferences.
2. Click on the Network section.
3. Create a NAT Network if one does not exist.

Now change the VM to use the new network.

1. Click on the VM name and then click Settings.
2. Click on the Network section and change the adapter to be Attached to the NATNetwork you created.

Port Forwarding for SSH

Once the VM has started and you've configured networking, you can install ssh, apt-get install openssh-server, and get the instance IP ip addr show. Then you can forward port 22 on the guest instance to 2222 on the VM host (your computer) and SSH into the instance.

To enable access to the Grafana webpage from the VM host (ie. your computer) we need to forward a port to VirtualBox which will map it onto the VM port 3000. This is configured as follows:

In the VirtualBox main window, click on File, then Preferences.

1. Click on the Network section.
2. Edit your NAT Network.
3. Click Port Forwarding.
4. Add a rule to forward host port 2222 (IP address blank) to guest port 22 (enter the IP of the guest host).

You can now connect as student at localhost:2222 via SSH on your computer to access the instance more easily.

Directions for Labs

The directions for this lab set are available at:

• Metrics with Influx/Grafana

• HA InfluxDB

• Docker Basics

• Saltstack for Configuration Management