6. Installation of a Complete DIMS Instance¶
The Distributed Incident Management System (DIMS) is a system comprised of many sub-systems. That is to say, there are many inter-related and inter-dependent services that work together to provide a coherent whole which is called a DIMS instance. These subsytems may be provided by daemons running in a normal Linux system running on bare-metal (i.e., an operating system installed onto a standard computer hardware server), in a virtual machine running on a bare-metal host, or in Docker containers. Conceptually, it does not matter what underlying operating system is used, whether it is physical or virtual, or whether it is a Docker container: DIMS is comprised of micro-services that communicate using standard TCP/IP connections, regardless of where those services are running.
This chapter covers the steps necessary to install and configure a DIMS instance using (a) a single server running a cluster comprised of three virtual machines, and (b) a three-node bare-metal cluster.
6.1. Cluster Foundation Setup¶
To bootstrap a DIMS instance, it is necessary to first install the required base operating system, pre-requisite packages, and software components that serve as the foundation for running the DIMS micro-services. This includes the DIMS software and configuration files that differentiate one DIMS instance from another on the network.
Each DIMS instance has a routable Internet connection from at least one node and an internal local area network on which the DIMS system components are connected on the back end. This means there is at least one IP address block that is shared on the back, regardless of whether the primary node has its own DNS domain and Internet accessible IP address (as would be the case for a production service deployment) or uses dynamic addressing on WiFi or wired interface for a local development deployment.
A DIMS deployment that is to be used for public facing services on the Internet requires a real DNS domain and routable IP address(es), with SSL certificates to secure the web application front end. To remotely administer the system requires setting up SSH keys for secure remote access and/or remote administration using Ansible.
Accounts in the Trident user portal can be set up from the command
line using the tcli user interface, or by using the Trident
web application front end.