SETUP APPLIANCE WITH VIRTUALBOX

This guide describes the setup of Oracle VirtualBox and the installation of the Plan.Net Business Intelligence appliance on Debian 9 (Stretch). Please note that only Debian 9 is supported at the moment.

The appliance ships with the following features:

• various utilities, i.e. git, curl, wget, mc, htop, gcc, tmux, screen, yarn
• zsh extended Bourne shell, including the Powerlevel9k theme for zsh
• Pycharm, the Python Integrated Development Environment
• a local MongoDB server instance
• Robo3T and MongoDB Compass client
• Postman, the API development environment
• Miniconda3, the lightweight installation of Anaconda Data Science Platform
• Chromium, the Open-Source browser, Gimp, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, Meld, the graphical diff tool
• hostnames of Plan.Net BI clusters at AWS and SP, including ssh tweaks
• various Desktop tweaks to make your life easier
• preinstalled core3 and core4os sources

Install Virtualbox

Windows and Mac Installation

Download and install the latest version from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads.

Linux Installation

There are various step-by-step guides available in the web. See for example https://tecadmin.net/install-virtualbox-debian-9-stretch/.

prerequisites

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

add software repository

echo "deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian stretch contrib" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/virtualbox.list

import sign key

wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox_2016.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -
wget -q https://www.virtualbox.org/download/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

install and launch

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-6.0

Create a Virtual Machine

Launch virtualbox with the following settings:

• 4gB RAM or more
• virtual hard disk with fixed size, e.g. 64gB or more

Install Debian 9

Download Debian 9 ISO image from https://www.debian.org/releases/stretch/debian-installer/index.de.html

Start the virtual machine and select the downloaded image for installation.

REMEMBER YOUR PASSWORDS! You need to remember the administration and your personal password. If you do not remember, then you will have to setup a fresh appliance. We cannot recover any lost or forgotten passwords!

Install Guest Additions

Start the Debian 9 virtual machine, launch a terminal and run the following commands:

su -
apt update
apt upgrade
apt install build-essential module-assistant dkms
m-a prepare
sh /media/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run
reboot

Setup the display in Debian to suite your needs.

Install Plan.Net BI appliance

Open a terminal and run the following commands

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plan-net/appliance/master/bootstrap-bi.sh
bash bootstrap-bi.sh

ADDITIONAL NOTES

• The Plan.Net BI appliance ships with an automated update. You can enforce the update with touch ~/.pnbi_salt/.upgrade.

• For testing purposes you can pass a branch to bootstrap-bi.sh. The default branch is master. To switch for example to develop, run bash bootstrap-bi.sh develop. Please note, that automatic updates are working with this branch. You will have to switch back to master manually by running the bootstrap-bi.sh script again or by checking out to master manually in git -C ~/.pnbi_salt/appliance checkout master.

• It is safe to run ~/.pnbi_salt/appliance/bootstrap-bi.sh or ~/.pnbi_salt/appliance/update-bi.py manually and at any time.