Prerequisites
This guide assumes you have a running RHEL server with access to the repositories (repos). VisibleThread Docs .rpm has some dependencies (httpd, openssl, java) that are available in the Red Hat repos. These packages will be pulled in automatically by our .rpm file and do not need to be manually installed.
Note: VT Docs will create a user called 'visiblethread' upon installation; do not create a 'visiblethread' user before installing!
Note: Attached at the end of the article is a sudoers file. It can be referenced to give a new OS user the minimum required permissions to install the rpm file. If you want to copy/paste the contents of the file into a sudoers file in /etc/sudoers.d/ you will have to either update the user in the attached file from vtuser to the username you will create or create a user with the same name.
Repositories
The repos are typically made available via two methods:
⦁ an active Red Hat subscription – typically used when RHEL runs on-prem, OR
⦁ Red Hat Update Infrastructure (RHUI) – available with cloud providers (e.g. Azure and AWS) to mirror Red Hat-hosted repos and automatically make them available to official RHEL cloud VMs.
Minimum Server Spec
4GB RAM
2 CPU Cores
80GB disk
Note: VisibleThread Docs requires port 443 and port 22. VisibleThread Docs requires 'sudo su' permission to install correctly.
Note: Deployments have been tested on RHEL 8.
Deployments have been tested on VMware ESX Vsphere/vcenter, Hyper-V, Azure, AWS
Step 1: PostgreSQL Install
PostgreSQL Database is mandatory. Although the rpm doesn’t depend on it, PostgreSQL is required. We support PostgreSQL versions 10 - 13 and recommend using a version minimum of 12. Here is an example install of PostgreSQL 12 using the PostgreSQL 12 module:
Install PostgreSQL 12
sudo dnf module enable postgresql:12
sudo dnf install -y postgresql-server postgresql-contrib
Initialize the DB:
sudo su - postgres -c "/usr/bin/postgresql-setup --initdb"
Enable and start Postgresql service:
sudo systemctl enable --now postgresql
Verify service is active:
systemctl status postgresql
Now that you verified that PostgreSQL is running you can download and install the VT Docs rpm file.
Step 2: Java Install
Run the following to install the correct version of Java:
sudo yum install -y java-17-openjdk
Step 3: Download and Install VT Docs
The VT Docs .rpm is available to download here:
https://visiblethread.s3.amazonaws.com/public/download/visiblethread-docs-6.1.1-1.x86_64.rpm
To verify that the download was completed successfully, you can check the md5 hash:
md5sum visiblethread-docs-6.1.1-1.x86_64.rpm
The valid MD5 Hash is 1b93a0811c6d4ba3433dd2a796649544
Install
To install the RPM just run the following command;
sudo yum install -y visiblethread-docs-6.1.1-1.x86_64.rpm
Step 4: Check if fapolicyd is installed
If fapolicy is installed it will block Apache Tomcat from being installed correctly, because of this you should whitelist the required directory in your fapolicy, see below.
- Check if fapolicyd is installed
sudo systemctl status fapolicy
- If fapolicyd is NOT installed please ignore this section. If faploicy is installed please run the below command to whitelist the install directory for Apache Tomcat.
# as root user
echo "allow perm=any uid=visiblethread : dir=/opt/visiblethread/tomcat/" >> /etc/fapolicyd/rules.d/01-visiblethread.rules
fapolicyd-cli --update
systemctl restart fapolicyd
sudo systemctl restart visiblethread-docs.service
To upload your license and set up users please follow this link and start from Section 2:
https://support.visiblethread.com/hc/en-us/articles/214225446-Deploying-VisibleThread-On-Premise-behind-your-corporate-firewall