Experiences with SCIONlab installation procedure

[Fritz Steinmann]

Hi all

First let me express my gratefulness for the work the people at SCIONlab have done over the past few months to bring the VM's and native installation to the level we see now. I just want to share my experiences to improve the system further. Please note that my adventures might not apply to a lot of people, but who knows what folks operate in their environment out there.

So - to prepare for SCION Retreat 2018 I wanted to set up a SCION connection from my laptop. I created an AS without VPN and no VM. Installing SCION with the install script worked fine, but I couldn't run the network. During the compiling phase at "./scion.sh run" I received weird errors which I couldn't interpret at first glance. I tried to circumvent most of them by commenting out the statements (mostly fprintf's with no impact on functionality), but failed as well - until I realized that I was on a 32 Bit installation... :-(

Cause #1, 32 Bit platform. Remediation: check platform in scion_install_script.sh (e.g. with uname -m) before actually installing anything

I then moved to another low-end laptop and tried to set it up there (making sure it was a 64 Bit installation). Still native installation, no VM, no VPN. Unfortunately I am already on Ubuntu 18.04, so the installer (rightfully) complains. I tried to sneak around by changing the installer, but it then failed on pip3 dependencies (exact hash required).

Cause #2, wrong OS version. Remediation: port to newer Ubuntu LTS version (probably not something done in 5 mins, if I find time I will try to help out there)

So - finally I decided to go with a VM. I therefore created a new AS with a VM, but no VPN. Installation again worked fine, up to the point when I tried "vagrant up". It then failed because my prehistoric processor didn't support virtulaization... :-(

Cause #3, processor doesn't support VT-x. Remediation: check processor flags in scion_install_script.sh (e.g. with egrep ‘(vmx|svm)’ /proc/cpuinfo) before actually installing anything

Eventually I installed SCION on a virtual machine I found somewhere else and created a third AS with VM and VPN - works beautifully! :-)

Regards

Fritz

[Juan A. Garcia Pardo]

Hi Fritz,

Thank you very much for your message, time and effort.

As you have already analyzed, two out of the three issues are legal failures that can be checked upfront to prevent wasting time. 

For the first one, about checking the platform, I've created an issue against scion-coord, where the install script is: https://github.com/netsec-ethz/scion-coord/issues/251

About the second issue, you will be happy to hear that we have started a project to port all scion binary and development files to different debian distros, including latest Ubuntu LTS. We will inform the community as soon as we have it working.

About the third and last issue, I would like to understand what your installation process exactly was. What I believe you did is that: 1) you downloaded an AS configuration from the Coordinator. 2) you ran `run.sh` inside that configuration package. 3) `run.sh` failed because virtualization capabilities. In case I got the steps correctly, I would say to leave things as they are, as vagrant and/or virtualbox are the ones deciding if they can run in these processors, and us checking about CPU capabilities breaks the separation of concerns principles. On the other hand, if you followed a different process to install it, we may have to do some other changes somewhere else. Please tell us if this is the case, or if you don't agree with this decision.

Thank you very much for your help,

Juan A.

[Fritz Steinmann]

Hi Juan

Of course you're right about the third issue - it's not the same installation procedure and I mixed things up. I followed the tutorial, installed all dependencies for Virtualbox and vagrant, and tried to start the VM. At this point the SCION subsystem doesn't even come into play yet.

So I think it would be just great if it could be pointed out in the tutorial as prerequisites that the processor obviously would need to be capable of running VM's (or it should be enabled in the BIOS).

Regards

Fritz 

On Tuesday, July 10, 2018 at 2:18:14 PM UTC+2, Fritz Steinmann wrote:

[Juan A. Garcia Pardo]

Hi Fritz,

Agreed. I created another issue to document the machine specifications required to run the services from the Coordinator.

https://github.com/netsec-ethz/scion-coord/issues/254

Thanks again, and best regards,

Juan A.