How to install Micro Edge on a custom appliance

Overview
You can deploy Micro Edge on x86 based devices that use common components.

Note: Micro Edge supports a limited set of network controllers and other system components. We recommend Intel and Marvell based components for optimal compatibility. If you have requirements for other types of components please submit your requests through our feedback system.

Imaging Micro Edge to a custom x86-based appliance involves the following steps:

1. Write the Micro Edge image to a USB drive
2. Access your target device via console
3. Boot the USB drive on the target system
4. Confirm Internet connectivity
5. Download the Micro Edge image
6. Identify the target storage device label
7. Write the Micro Edge image to the storage device
8. Reboot and get started

Write the Micro Edge image to a USB drive

This step involves downloading Micro Edge to your management computer and writing to a USB drive using a disk writing utility such as BalenaEtcher or the dd utility that is built into macOS and Linux based systems.

1. Insert a USB drive. Note that all contents and file system will be overwritten.
2. Download the software image from ETM Dashboard.
3. Extract the downloaded gzip file. The file should end with a .img extension. On Windows systems you can use tools such as WinRAR or 7-Zip. On Linux or macOS you can use a software program such as BalenaEtcher the "gunzip" utility from the command line.

   gunzip MFW-US-e6-v6.0.0.img.gz

4. Using your image writing utility, image the file onto the USB disk.
   See example below using dd on macOS:

   sudo dd if=/Downloads/mfw-x86-64-combined.img of=/dev/disk2

5. Once the imaging is complete, eject the disk.

Access your target device via console

The next part of the process requires direct access to the console of your target appliance. This can be either from a high resolution output such as HDMI, or via serial console depending on the specifications of the device. Note that if you connect via an external display, you will also need a USB keyboard attached to the device.

Important note: If you connect via serial console, the baud rate used by micro edge is 115200. Make sure your device is configured for this baud rate.

Boot the USB drive on the target system
Before preparing to boot the system you will need to access the BIOS to confirm the following:

• The first boot device must be USB
• The device must be configured to support non-UEFI boot (traditional BIOS boot). 

If the device boots properly from the USB image you should see output similar to the image below:

Confirm internet connectivity
In the next step, you will need to download the Micro Edge image onto your temporary running instance of Micro Edge. 

Your target system must have at least two network interfaces. The Internet interface in the system is labeled "eth1". Connect your network to the device and check the output for the following:

eth1: igb: eth1 NIC Link is Up 1000 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: RX

If you see a different interface such as eth0, try connecting to a different port until you see the output containing eth1.

To check if your device successfully obtained an IP address, run the following command and review the output.

root@mfw:/# ifconfig eth1
eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr C0:69:11:16:1E:5B  
          inet addr:192.168.12.191  Bcast:192.168.12.255  Mask:255.255.255.0

In the example output above, there is an IP address obtained via DHCP. Once you confirm your device is connected to the network, verify Internet connectivity using the ping utility. See the example below.

root@mfw:/# ping google.com
PING google.com (142.250.189.238): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 142.250.189.238: seq=0 ttl=57 time=1.753 ms

Download the Micro Edge image
For this step you need to copy the Micro Edge image to the /tmp directory of the running instance of Micro Edge. You can obtain the Micro Edge image download link by logging into your ETM Dashboard account and navigating to the Micro Edge download screen.

Once you have copied the download link, run the command below from the management console of your running Micro Edge instance to download the image to the tmp directory. 

wget -P /tmp <link to download>

Identify the target storage device label
You need to identify the device label of your primary storage device. In most cases, the easiest way to identify your local storage device is based on the storage size. Use the following command:

dmesg | grep “logical blocks”

In the example below the device “sdb” is the target storage device based on the disk size.

root@mfw:/# dmesg | grep "logical blocks"
[ 4.888337] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] 1968128 512-byte logical blocks: (1.01 GB/961 MiB)
[ 5.131603] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] 124190720 512-byte logical blocks: (63.6 GB/59.2 GiB)

Write the Micro Edge image to the storage device
Confirm that the image file successfully downloaded by listing the /tmp directory.
In the example below the file mfw-x86-64-combined.img.gz successfully saved to the /tmp directory as seen by the output.

root@mfw:/# ls -tr /tmp
MFW-US-e6-v6.0.0.img.gz

Once you confirm the target device label and the image file exists on the file system you can write the image to the local storage device using the gzip with the dd command. Following the previous example, the command would be:

gzip -dc MFW-US-e6-v6.0.0.img.gz | dd of=/dev/sdb

Allow several minutes for the image to write to the disk. 
Once the dd command completes you can shut down, remove the USB drive, and reboot.

Reboot and get started

Once the image has been successfully written, you can reboot the device using the "reboot" command. Make sure to remove the USB device once the system has powered off.

You should see a boot screen similar to the one from the USB boot step. Allow at least one minute for the system to fully boot. Once booted, run the same steps from the previous step to confirm Internet connectivity.

The final step is to capture the device UID. You can locate your UID from the config directory using the following command:

root@mfw:/# cat /etc/config/uid
3ad5a582-cb14-44cf-b1f8-d9b6ecd916dc

Now that you have the UID, you can add the appliance to your ETM Dashboard account to get started.

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