Installation Setup

SystemsLab is distributed through custom APT and RPM repositories. This page describes how to set these up and is a prerequisite to actually installing the SystemsLab server, agent, or CLI.

Supported Distros

We currently provide packages for the following linux distros

• Debian: buster, bullseye, and bookworm
• Ubuntu: focal, jammy, lunar, and mantic (but not noble at the time)
• Amazon Linux 2

If you need a distro not listed above contact us and we will be happy to package it for you.

System Requirements

The SystemsLab server currently requires at a minimum

• 2 CPUs
• 8GB of RAM
• 128GB of disk space

A long running server will require more disk space as the database grows. If the server is configured to store artifacts locally it may require more disk space as well.

The SystemsLab agent requires at a minimum

• 1 CPU
• 8GB of RAM
• 4GB of disk space

Note that the RAM usage will be minimal (<1GB) while running an experiment so it can be shared with the workload under test.

Acquiring an Access Key

The package repositories for SystemsLab require credentials to access. Someone from IOP Systems will provide you with the access key you need to access them during onboarding.

INFO

If you're just looking to install the SystemsLab CLI then you can skip this step, the CLI is available from the public SystemsLab repositories.

Setting up Repository Access

We provide packages that will automatically set up the public repositories that SystemsLab needs for all of our supported distros.

First, you will need to download correct package for your distro

curl -fsSL "https://storage.googleapis.com/systemslab-public/deb/systemslab-repo-$(lsb_release -sc)_latest_all.deb" -o systemslab-repo.deb

Then you need to install it

sudo apt-get install ./systemslab-repo.deb

TIP

If the apt user is unable to access the systemslab-repo.deb file then you may get warnings that apt had to fetch the package as root. These are harmless but you can avoid the warning by downloading the package to a location the apt user has access to, such as /tmp.

Once the install is complete you will need to update the list of available packages so that your systems knows about the packages in the newly added repositories.

sudo apt-get update

First, you will need to install the correct package for your distro

sudo yum install "https://storage.googleapis.com/systemslab-public/rpm/systemslab-repo-$(rpm --eval '%{dist}' | cut -d. -f2)-latest.noarch.rpm"

INFO

If you only need to install the SystemsLab CLI then you can stop at this step. The packages for the CLI are public and you can install them via either of apt install systemslab-cli or yum install systemslab-cli, as appropriate.

You can also skip the instructions above and install it via homebrew

brew install iopsystems/iop/systemslab

Once installed, check out the command line reference.

Now that the public repositories are set up, you will need to enable the private SystemsLab repositories. This will require the access key you got in step 1.

sudo /usr/share/systemslab-repo/setup-repo.sh --credentials /path/to/credentials.json

TIP

If you are running on GCP and the service account for the current machine has access to the SystemsLab repositories already then you can avoid providing credentials by running

sudo /usr/share/systemslab-repo/setup-repo.sh --skip-credentials

You will need to explicitly request that the relevant service account is granted access during onboarding. Note that if the current service account does not have access to the repository then this will cause future apt update commands to error.