Running the Baremetal Installer

Once you have prepared bootable media, you are ready to install the sensor on the target machine.

The installer erases the entire target disk.

Booting the Installer

  1. Insert the USB drive in the target machine and power it on.

  2. Enter the firmware setup and set Boot mode to UEFI. Disable Legacy/CSM.

    The installer image is UEFI-only. Boot the USB drive as its UEFI: entry, not the legacy entry of the same name.

  3. Move the USB drive to the top of the boot order, or select it from the firmware's one-time boot menu.

  4. At the GRUB menu, select Install Stellar Cyber Modular Sensor. The entry boots automatically if you do not intervene.

  5. The installer banner appears on every console. Press Enter on the console you are actually using — attached monitor or serial — to run the installation there.

Reviewing the System Check

The installer inspects the machine before it writes anything. Confirm that the summary reports both of the following:

  • Hardware meets the minimum requirement.

  • Supported NIC present.

    The installer accepts Intel, NVIDIA / Mellanox ConnectX, and Broadcom network adapters. It lists each interface it detected, along with the adapter's vendor and model.

The summary also identifies the target disk, the sensor release being installed, and each network interface it detected. For example:

Copy 
Target disk:      /dev/sda (448G)
Image:            Stellar Cyber Modular Sensor Release 7.0.0
Detected hardware : 32 CPU cores, 63971 MiB RAM, 448G disk
Hardware meets the minimum requirement.
Detected NICs     :
   OK (Broadcom) eno16595 ... NetXtreme BCM5719 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe
   Supported NIC present.

If no supported network interface is found, the installation stops. The sensor cannot be installed on hardware without a supported NIC.

Note the target disk named in the summary. The installer erases that entire disk.

Installing the Sensor

  1. At the appliance configuration prompt, press Enter to accept the default, 1) Auto-detect appliance model.

  2. The installer brings up networking using DHCP, checks whether the Stellar Cyber release server is reachable, and looks for an updated hardware model map. Because your hardware is not a Stellar Cyber appliance, it then reports that it is performing a generic installation:

    Copy 
    Bringing up network (DHCP) ...
    Link up on: eno16595
    Address: eno16595 10.16.11.104/22
    Default route: default via 10.16.8.1 dev eno16595
      acps.stellarcyber.ai:443 reachable
    No newer Photon model map on the release server; using the bundled map.
    System product name: unknown
    Not a recognized Photon appliance; performing a generic install (no config).
    Config to apply: none (generic)

    This is the expected result on customer-supplied hardware. No appliance configuration is applied.

    The installer continues if the release server cannot be reached — it falls back to the hardware model map bundled in the image. Outbound access to acps.stellarcyber.ai on port 443 is described in Firewall Requirements.

  3. The installer warns that it will erase the target disk. Type yes to continue.

  4. The installer writes the sensor image to disk and verifies it. When the installation completes, INSTALLATION COMPLETE appears.

  5. Remove the USB drive, so that the machine reboots into the installed sensor rather than the installer.

  6. Press Enter to reboot, or wait for the installer to reboot automatically.

The machine reboots once into the installed sensor. It is ready when the login prompt appears.

Next Steps

After installing on hardware, log in and lock the network interface ordering so that interface names survive reboots:

  1. Use show udev to view the interface MAC addresses.

  2. Use set udev persistent-rule to lock the interface ordering.

Refer to Available Commands in the Sensor CLI Access Window for the full syntax of these commands.