isle/docs/admin/creating-a-new-network.md

Creating a New Network

This guide is for those who wish to start a new isle network of their own.

By starting a new isle network, you are becoming the administrator of a network. Be aware that being a network administrator is not necessarily easy, and the users of your network will frequently need your help in order to have a good experience. It can be helpful to have others with which you are administering the network, in order to share responsibilities.

Requirements

Creating a network is done using a single host, which will become the first host in the network.

The configuration used during network creation will be identical to that used during normal operation of the host, so be prepared to commit to that configuration for a non-trivial amount of time.

The requirements for this host are:

• A public static IP, or a dynamic public IP with dDNS set up.

  • There should be UDP port which is accessible publicly over that IP/DNS name. This may involve forwarding the UDP port in your gateway if the host is behind a NAT, and/or allowing traffic on that UDP port in your hosts firewall.

• At least 3 GB of disk storage space.

  • At least 3 directories should be chosen, each of which will be committing at least 1GB. Ideally these directories should be on different physical disks, but if that's not possible it's ok. See the Next Steps section.

• None of the resources being used for this network (the UDP port or storage locations) should be being used by other networks.

Step 1: Configure the isle Daemon

Open /etc/isle/daemon.yml in a text editor and perform the following changes:

• Set the vpn.public_addr field to the host:port your host is accessible on, where host is the static public IP/DNS name of your host, and port is the UDP port which is publicly accessible.

• Configure 3 (at least) allocations in the storage.allocations section.

Save and close the file.

Run the following to restart the daemon with the new configuration:

sudo systemctl restart isle

Step 2: Choose Parameters

There are some key parameters which must be chosen when creating a new network. These will remain constant throughout the lifetime of the network, and so should be chosen with care.

• Name: A human-readable name for the network. This will only be used for display purposes.

• Subnet: The IP subnet (or CIDR) will look something like 10.10.0.0/16, where the /16 indicates that all IPs from 10.10.0.0 to 10.10.255.255 are included. It's recommended to choose from the ranges reserved for private networks, but within that selection the choice is up to you.

• Domain: isle is shipped with a DNS server which will automatically configure itself with all hosts in the network, with each DNS entry taking the form of hostname.hosts.domain, where domain is the domain chosen in this step. The domain may be a valid public domain or not, it's up to you.

• Hostname: The hostname of your host, which will be the first host in the network, must be chosen at this point. You can reference the Adding a Host to the Network document for the constraints on the hostname.

• IP: The IP of your host, which will be the first host in the network. This IP must be within the chosen subnet range.

Step 3: Create the Network

To create the network, run:

sudo isle network create \
    --name <name> \
    --ip-net <subnet> \
    --domain <domain> \
    --hostname <hostname>

At this point your host, and your network, are ready to go! To add other hosts to the network you can reference the Adding a Host to the Network document.