Do you need to develop assets that also need to work in an offline environment?
No Problem! Arcus helps you develop with offline use in mind:
- Community assets are developed with offline environments in mind. Most Certified community assets have an offline mode, and you can find the same assets available to re-use in offline environments. Check the Help page on community assets if you have any questions
- Update servers are available in offline Arcus environments, including Red Hat 6 and 7, Ubuntu 16, and Windows:
- Run
yum -y update
andyum -y install [package]
commands - Run
apt-get -y update && apt-get -y upgrade
andapt-get -y install [package]
commands - Run Windows updates on a variety of OS versions
- Run
- Elastic Test Tools like Nessus scans are available in offline Arcus environments, so your test assets (or the community test assets) will work just fine offline
When developing offline versions of your assets, here are helpful hints to keep in mind:
- You can develop smart assets that detect if it is online or offline, and run in an offline mode
- Include media files in the
media
directory of your asset - Reduce dependencies on Internet downloads
Test your Offline Asset before going Offline
Networks are easily customizable on every run that you launch with Arcus. The primary network is the default route for your host to connect to the Internet. To emulate an offline environment, you have 2 options:
Remove routable networks from your run:
-
Remove the primary network from your run. You can to this by clicking Edit on the Networking options in the run wizard:
-
Delete the “primary” network and any other routable networks:
-
Click Next and continue to launch your run
This will deploy the run without Internet connectivity to simulate an “offline” environment.
Allocate a new Cloudspace without routable networks:
- Put in a support ticket to have a Cloudspace created for your team with only isolated networks. This will behave like an offline environment.
Advanced Techniques
- Automate the creation of “offline” assets using the ReST API to download and import assets
- Create an “online” asset that downloads and packages an asset for offline use