Quick Start Guide

Quick Start Guide¶

To start using qbee.io, you need to sign up for an account. You can do this by visiting our sign-up page where you will be asked to provide your name, email address, password and a company name. Use "private" or similar as company name if you are non-commercial. Once you have filled in the required information, click on the "Sign-up" button to create your account. You will receive an email with a link to confirm your email address. Click on the link to confirm your email address and complete the sign-up process. After that, you will have a 14-day trial period to test qbee.io and decide if it fits your needs. At any time, you can switch to a free plan with a 2 device limit or choose one of our paid plans.

Bootstrap a device¶

Bootstrapping is the process of securely pairing the device with your qbee.io account. Here the initial trust (between the device and the platform) is established through the creation and exchange of keys. More information about the bootstrap process can be found here.

Before you start the bootstrap process, you will need a bootstrap key from the Bootstrap keys page.

Read more about the bootstrap process here.

Using Docker¶

If you have Docker installed on your system, you can use it to bootstrap a demo device with our qbee-demo image:

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

This command will start the latest Debian Linux inside the container with qbee.io agent installed, and it will initiate the bootstrap process for you. Once the bootstrap process is complete, you will be able to see the device in the Devices section of the qbee.io web interface. Here you find a detailed tutorial.

Using a real device¶

If you have a real device available, you can install the agent using our installer script, which will download the latest version of qbee.io agent and bootstrap it using the provided key:

wget -O /tmp/qbee-agent-installer.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qbee-io/qbee-agent-installers/main/qbee-agent-installer.sh
sudo bash /tmp/qbee-agent-installer.sh --bootstrap-key <bootstrap_key>

We strongly recommend reviewing the script before executing it, as it's going to run with root privileges on your device.

Example configuration¶

Once the device is bootstrapped, you can start configuring it.

To access configuration for a single device, go to the Devices section of the qbee.io web interface, select a device and click on the "Configure" tab. This will open the configuration page for the selected device. From there, you can select the configuration you want to apply to the device. For example, you can select the "Users" section and add a new user to the device—let's go with user "demo"—and click on the "Save settings" button to save the change.

At this stage, the configuration won't be applied to the device yet, as we only prepared a configuration change. To apply the configuration change, you need to click on the "Commit changes" button and provide a commit message (which will help track changes in the audit log). This will commit all saved changes and apply them to the device. Once the configuration change is committed, you need to wait for up to 5 minutes for the change to appear on the device.

Read more about the configuration management here.

Checking the audit log¶

Whenever changes are made to the system, they are logged in the audit log. To check the audit log, go to the Audit section of the qbee.io web interface. This will open the audit log page where you can see all the changes made to the system. You should see the configuration change you just made in the audit log.

Checking the logs¶

To check the logs of the device, go to the Devices section of the qbee.io web interface, select a device and click on the "Logs" tab. This will open the logs' page for the selected device. From there, you can see the logs of the device and filter them by severity.

Once the configuration change is applied to the device, you should see "Successfully added user 'demo'" log entry.

Remote access¶

To access the device remotely, go to the Devices section of the qbee.io web interface, select a device and click on the "Open console" button. This will open a terminal session connected to the device's SSH daemon (on port 22). If you are using our qbee-demo docker image, you can log in with user qbee and password qbee. From there, you can verify that the user "demo" was added to the device by running the id command:

id demo

Quick Start Guide