Install in Amazon Web Services

Before you perform any procedures on this page, ensure that you have an account on AWS with an IAM user, a key pair and an access key:

  • The IAM user should have, at a minimum, permissions to create, attach, delete, and snapshot EBS volumes as well as create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

  • If you are using IAM Identity Center, you can use an IAM Identity Center user with the same permissions instead. Consult Amazon documentation for more information if required.

Launch a Lighthouse from the AWS Marketplace

Lighthouse is available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace. You can subscribe to get access to our published AMIs.

Note: You must still contact Sales to obtain a license.

  1. Go to AWS Marketplace: Opengear Lighthouse Software AMI.

  2. Follow the steps to subscribe.

  3. After you subscribe, navigate to your AWS Marketplace > Manage subscriptions page.

  4. Under Actions for the Lighthouse AMI subscription, click Launch.
    The Launch new instance page displays.

  5. From the Software version drop-down, select the latest version of Lighthouse.

  6. From the Region drop-down, select the region.

  7. Click the Continue to launch through EC2 button.

  8. Continue to Launching in Amazon Web Services.

Launch a Lighthouse on AWS from a manually created AMI

To use Lighthouse with Amazon Web Services (AWS), you must first create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing Lighthouse in the AWS region in which you want to deploy Lighthouse. A temporary Linux “build-box” EC2 instance should be used to create a private Lighthouse AMI.

Note:  This is a one-time procedure. The AMI can be used to create multiple instances of Lighthouse, and upgrades can be performed through the Lighthouse Web UI.

  1. Create an AWS EC2 Linux instance, with the following settings:

    • Amazon Linux 2 or Amazon Linux 2023

    • t3.large instance type with default (8 GiB) root volume

    • 50GB gp3 volume

    Consult Amazon documentation for more information if required.

  2. Create a Lighthouse AMI, using the lighthouse-aws-bootstrap.sh script (usage information can be displayed by using the -h option) on the EC2 instance created in the previous step. The steps are detailed as follows:

    1. Connect via SSH to your instance on AWS using the username ec2-user and the private key you created previously. All subsequent steps must be performed on the instance.

    2. Configure AWS using the following command:
      aws configure

    3. Provide the access key and region details (other settings may be left unchanged). If you are using IAM Identity Center, you must instead configure using aws configure sso, and set the CLI Profile Name to be default.

    4. Download the aws-bootstrap script:
      wget http://ftp.opengear.com/download/lighthouse_software/current/lighthouse/aws/lighthouse-aws-bootstrap.sh

    5. Run the lighthouse-aws-bootstrap.sh script as follows:
      bash ./lighthouse-aws-bootstrap.sh -n Lighthouse -r https://ftp.opengear.com/download/lighthouse_software/current/lighthouse/aws/lighthouse-<year>-<month>-<version>.aws.raw.tar

    6. Wait while the Lighthouse AMI is created. This can take some time (up to 30 minutes).

    7. After the AMI has been created, terminate the Linux EC2 instance to avoid incurring additional costs.

  3. Continue to Launching in Amazon Web Services.

Run the Bootstrap Script - Example

$ bash ./lighthouse-aws-bootstrap.sh -n Lighthouse -r \
> http://ftp.opengear.com/download/lighthouse_software/current/lighthouse/aws/lighthouse-24.06.02.aws.raw.tar
Downloading image...
Image size is 54049899008 bytes (51 GiB)
Creating volume...
Attaching volume vol-09fb0b463f5a59eaf to EC2 instance...
Cloning image onto volume...
0+852971 records in
0+852971 records out
54049899008 bytes (54 GB, 50 GiB) copied, 845.072 s, 64.0 MB/s
Creating snapshot of volume...
Waiting for snapshot snap-0f83746856d985070 to complete...
Creating AMI from snapshot snap-0f83746856d985070...
Done!
Cleaning up...

Changes to Default Settings

Caution: With Lighthouse version 24.06.0 and later, changes have been introduced related to the root user and SSH Password Authentication default settings that impact any newly launched Lighthouse AWS instances.

Changes impacting the root user:

  • For security purposes the root user is disabled by default. The root user can be enabled by going to > USERS & ACCOUNTS > Local Users.

  • A new user called lhadmin is provided that should be used for initial configuration.

  • SSH connection for root is also disabled by default. To enable, navigate to > USERS & Accounts > SSH Authentication.

  • Ensure to run all commands with appending sudo.

Changes impacting SSH Password Authentication:

  • SSH Password Authentication is disabled by default.

  • User accounts require a Public SSH Key associated with the account.

  • Users will use their Private SSH key to connect via SSH.

  • The lhadmin user will default with the AWS key pair that was used to create the Lighthouse Instance.

  • To associate a Public SSH Key to the account navigate to > USERS & ACCOUNTS > Local Users and add the SSH Authentication Key to the user.

Limitations

AWS support is currently limited to:

  • All standard Lighthouse operations.

  • Running on the AWS platform.

  • Providing aws-cli tools for interaction with AWS.

  • Loading the provided SSH key for the lhadmin user.

  • Running custom scripts on startup (see above).

  • Providing a lhadmin password via userdata (see above).

At this time Lighthouse does not support:

  • Using AWS database services.

  • Using AWS redis services.

  • Using any of AWS scalability functionality.

Note:  If you want to deploy Lighthouse across different AWS regions, an AMI is required in each region. Amazon supports copying AMIs between regions and offers a walkthrough of the necessary steps to do this.