Select the appropriate agent for your device

Basic information about the qbee agent

qbee.io requires a lightweight agent package on the embedded device. This agent is designed for low resource usage and it is highly portable covering most hardware platforms. The agent utilizes a pull-based configuration management approach, enabling it to work effectively across firewalls and in various edge deployment scenarios. Test it on real hardware or in docker.

Test on real hardware

Identify your architecture and OS with uname -a or uname -m and possibly qbee already provides an agent that works:

root@ctr-700-422471:~# uname -a                                                                                                                                                                                                  
Linux ctr-700-422471 4.9.88-04910-g55e1fe5 #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Apr 1 07:54:29 CEST 2019 armv7l GNU/Linux

In this case the armv71 indicates an 32 bit ARM architecture.

I don't have hardware and want to test a virtual agent in docker

If you do not have any hardware available but have docker installed you can simply create a virtual qbee agent device in docker. This command works on Linux, macOS and Windows:

docker run -it -e BOOTSTRAP_KEY=<bootstrap-key> qbeeio/qbee-demo

For more information please refer to "here".

Our qbee platform offers a wide range of package options, including ones for your specific platform. If we don't have one available, we can create a custom package for you by cross-compiling it to your Linux OS and architecture. These packages can be found under the "Package" tab in your qbee web application.

Architecture	OS	Package:
ARM 32bit	Debian based	armhf
ARM 64 bit	Debian based	arm64
Intel x86	Debian based	amd64
virtual	Docker based	docker command

Our platform is designed to be highly versatile, running on any device that supports basic Linux, from full servers to limited embedded devices. We constantly update our library of available agent packages, creating specific libraries for devices with customized Linux, as well as general packages that will run on many platforms that follow common Linux flavour styles. If your device is based on any flavour of Debian Linux, you can try the corresponding package for your CPU architecture (e.g. Armhf or AMD64), which often works out of the box. We can also provide packages as tarballs, giving you even more flexibility. In addition, we have a Yocto meta layer available to integrate into your Yocto build.

Tip

We can basically create the qbee agent for any Linux system. Please ask us if your system is not in the list in the package tab.

We also have YOCTO packages available. Please reach out if you have questions.