Manually Create a Local Repo

Manually creating a local repo requires initial access to the Internet to retrieve all dependencies, then the machine can be air-gapped.

External Libraries for SCS

Three external libraries to install SCS are:

External Library	Description
Podman 3.0.1	Required for HTTP support. Dependencies of Podman 3.0.1 (podman_packages.tar) is included with Swarm v14.1 Update Bundle package.
Pause Container	The `k8s.gcr.io_pause:3.2` is a container to hold the network namespace for the pod.
Bash Autocompletion	Required for tabbing on scsctl. Sourced from the EPEL repository for CentOS.

Set up the Environment

Offline installation for CentOS requires RPMs and dependencies for all those packages on a repository. This is challenging in air-gapped networks or networks with no Internet access. The best way is to create a local offline repository.

Minimum installation requirements are:

Install a VM with CentOS 7.9 (or the previous version) and a “Minimal Server” profile.
Run yum to resolve dependencies for a package.
CentOS 7 server with Internet access and some disk space to pull the repo files.

SCS Dependencies

Install a set of packages to download RPMs and dependencies then create a repository. RPMs and dependencies use the download only yum-plugin to pull. Use the “createrepo” tool to create a repository for offline usage.

Steps to Check SCS Dependencies

Install the yum-downloadonly plugin.
```
yum -y install yum-plugin-downloadonly
```
The package by default comes with large installations.
Create a directory for download packages.
```
mkdir packages
```
Query the RPM dependencies.
```
rpm -qpR swarm-scs-{version}.x86_64.rpm
```

Result:

glibc >= 2.17
bash-completion
bash-completion-extras
dhcp
python3
iproute
chrony
NetworkManager
rsyslog
logrotate
cronie
/bin/sh
/bin/sh
/bin/sh
rpmlib(PayloadFilesHavePrefix) <= 4.0-1
rpmlib(CompressedFileNames) <= 3.0.4-1

Download SCS Dependencies

Pull the following from the above list to download SCS and RPM’s dependencies:

Query	Command
bash-completion	yum -y install --downloadonly --downloaddir=/root/packages/ bash-completion
bash-completion-extras	yum -y install --downloadonly --downloaddir=/root/packages/ bash-completion-extras
chrony	yum -y install --downloadonly --downloaddir=/root/packages/ chrony
cronie	yum -y install --downloadonly --downloaddir=/root/packages/ cronie
dhcp	yum -y install --downloadonly --downloaddir=/root/packages/ dhcp
iproute	yum -y install --downloadonly --downloaddir=/root/packages/ iproute
logrotate	yum -y install --downloadonly --downloaddir=/root/packages/ logrotate
NetworkManager	yum -y install --downloadonly --downloaddir=/root/packages/ NetworkManager
python3	yum -y install --downloadonly --downloaddir=/root/packages/ python3
rsyslog	yum -y install --downloadonly --downloaddir=/root/packages/ rsyslog

Create Podman 3.0.1 Repo

Swarm 15.x bundle includes podman offline repo. Refer to step 3 until step 7 of Online SCS Installation to create a local repo for podman.

Note

Downloaded packages are not enough to install SCS server due to third-party external packages. Suggest query on each downloaded RPM packages to get the new list for additional download.

Contact DataCore Support if facing any issue and need assistance for manually creating a local repo.

Create a Local Repo

Run “createrepo” against the packages folder.

[root@dhcp-128 ~]# createrepo packages/
Spawning worker 0 with 18 pkgs 
Spawning worker 1 with 18 pkgs 
Workers Finished 
Saving Primary metadata 
Saving file lists metadata 
Saving other metadata 
Generating sqlite DBs 
Sqlite DBs complete

Tar up the directory and its packages.
```
cd /root/
tar -cvf repo.tar packages/
```

Create an Offline Pause Container

Install Podman on CentOS 7.
```
yum -y install podman
```
Pull the Pause Container.

Create a new pod to automatically pull the k8s.gcr.io/pause:3.2 image.

podman pod create 
fc299d05422a55e46774aa06a66bc853109aeb4b1d7078f81f9ffa4eef26c8e0

List the pulled images.

podman images 
REPOSITORY        TAG     IMAGE ID      CREATED        SIZE
k8s.gcr.io/pause  3.2     80d28bedfe5d  22 months ago  688 kB

Note:
Tag “k8s.gcr.io/pause” with 3.2 or higher.

Export Pause Container and save it for offline installation.

podman save -o k8s.gcr.io_pause_3.2.tar k8s.gcr.io/pause:3.2

ll
total 680
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 692224 Dec  7 20:10 k8s.gcr.io_pause_3.2.tar

Next, see Install SCS Offline.