Installing a Test Agent Appliance on your own hardware

This page explains how to install Test Agent Appliance software on x86 hardware of your own.

Writing the Test Agent image to a USB stick

• Follow the instructions on the page Installing a Test Agent Appliance as a bootable image on a USB memory stick, up to and including the section “Writing the image to a USB memory stick using Etcher”.

Installing the Test Agent on your hardware

• Insert the USB stick with the Test Agent image into a USB port on your hardware device.

• Access the BIOS boot menu.

• Make sure the USB memory comes before the hard disk in the boot sequence.

• Select “USB boot” from the BIOS boot menu.

• The boot process takes about 20 seconds. When the login prompt is shown, log in as user “admin” with password “admin”.

• Go to Utilities.

• Select Install to disk.

Warning

Any existing content on the disk will be erased.

When the procedure has finished, the screen will look something like this:

You now need to reboot the hardware. Be sure to remove the USB stick so that the hardware boots from the installed image on the hard disk.

The hardware will now boot up as a Test Agent.

• When the login prompt is shown, log in with user “admin” and password “admin”. A text-based menu will now appear, as shown below.

• Make sure the hardware is connected to the Internet using a wired interface. You can check the link status by selecting Show interface status; read more about that here.

• You can also change IP addressing for management of the Test Agent by selecting Configure management. By default, the Test Agent uses DHCP on the first detected interface (normally called “eth0”). If your network does not offer DHCP addresses, you need to specify a static IP address on the Test Agent; how to do this is explained here. The same page also explains how to specify a different interface for Test Agent management.

If your hardware device has multiple wired interfaces and you are unsure which interface is eth0, unplug all interfaces but one and select Show interface status to see which interface has a link detected. It is helpful to label each interface with a sticker for easy reference when cabling on-site.

• Before you can use the Test Agent, you also need to register it with the Paragon Active Assurance server. How to do this is explained here.

After successful installation, the Test Agent will check for new software packages to ensure that it is up to date. This process may take several minutes to finish. After completing the update check, the Test Agent should automatically appear in your Paragon Active Assurance account.

• Click Test Agents on the main menu. This view shows all Test Agents in your account. Verify that your Test Agent is found here and has a green dot next to it, signifying that it is online.

If the Test Agent does not have a green dot, check that it has a license assigned (this is normally done automatically upon registration):

• Click the Test Agent in the Test Agents view, then click the License tab.

• If the Test Agent does not have a license, you need to assign one as explained here.