Prepare for setting up edge nodes

This content explains how to use your issued authentication credentials and related environment variable values to install the anax Agent on edge nodes. Perform these steps on an edge host that can connect to your Open Horizon management hub cluster.

Before you begin

• Contact your Open Horizon administrator for the information that you need to log in to the desired management hub instance. If you do not have one, you may choose to install an all-in-one instance locally on an x86 machine, or you can request an account on the LF Edge Community Lab developer instances.

Procedure

1. Each user who is setting up edge nodes must have an authentication string. You can use the same authentication string to set up all of your edge nodes (it is not saved on the edge nodes). An administrator can create a new user from the CLI:

   hzn exchange user create -o <existing organization ID> [-A] <desired username> <desired password> <user email address>
   

   Note the optional -A flag which grants organization admin privileges. The authentication string will be a combination of username and password separated by a colon. Both values should begin with an alpha character, not a number. Neither should contain spaces.

2. If you have not already installed the horizon-cli package on this host, do that now. See Post installation configuration for an example of this process.

3. Locate the agent-install.sh and agent-uninstall.sh scripts that were installed as part of the horizon-cli package. These scripts are required on each edge node during setup (currently agent-uninstall.sh only supports edge clusters):

   • Linux example:

     ls /usr/horizon/bin/agent-{install,uninstall}.sh
     

   • macOS example:

     ls /usr/local/bin/agent-{install,uninstall}.sh
     

4. Contact your Open Horizon administrator for help in setting these environment variables:

   export HZN_ORG_ID=<your-exchange-organization>
   export HZN_EXCHANGE_USER_AUTH=<authentication string>
   export HZN_EXCHANGE_URL= # example http://open-horizon.lfedge.iol.unh.edu:3090/v1
   export HZN_FSS_CSSURL= # example http://open-horizon.lfedge.iol.unh.edu:9443/
   export HZN_AGBOT_URL= # example http://open-horizon.lfedge.iol.unh.edu:3111
   export HZN_FDO_SVC_URL= # example http://open-horizon.lfedge.iol.unh.edu:9008/api
   

What’s next

When you are ready to set up edge nodes, follow the steps in Installing edge nodes.

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