Continuing to build an Infor ION Grid laboratory for my learning purposes, today I will install the Grid on a $10/month virtual [private] cloud, with DigitalOcean. Random fact: DigitalOcean is headquartered a few blocks from Infor’s headquarters down the Avenue of the Americas in New York.

Competition

There are various cloud hosting service providers for Infor M3 that compete with Infor. Some use cloud computing platforms other than Amazon Web Services. Competition is good to foster innovation, to drive prices down for customers, and to resist vendor lock-in. But it is a tough market as cloud infrastructure is a commodity, and unless those providers can differentiate themselves with a competitive advantage, they will be unable to survive against the utter economies of scale and expertise of Infor and Amazon and their thousands of employees dedicated to the cloud. As a laboratory for learning purposes, however, DigitalOcean or any other cloud platform are sufficient.

Disclaimers

The Grid bundled installer is available for internal use only, not for production use. ** Infor M3 only supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux (see the announcement thing), not CentOS. ** I am not revealing any internal information as Infor made the Installation Guide available online, and the rest can be achieved by inductive reasoning as I am doing. ** I will use Cygwin for the Unix tools on my Windows computer.

1. Create Droplet

In this step we will create a droplet in DigitalOcean:

1. Click Create Droplet, choose the CentOS distribution, and chose the $10/month size, it has the necessary and sufficient amount of memory (in my local virtual machine of 512 Mb RAM the Grid ran fine, but strangely in a droplet of the same 512 Mb RAM there was not enough memory and the Grid kept crashing, so I upgraded to the next bigger size; 1 Gb of RAM is sufficient as we do not need more):
   
2. Generate an SSH key pair on your computer, if you do not already have one:

   ssh-keygen

   

3. Add your public key to the droplet (copy/paste):

   cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

   

4. Set the hostname, e.g. droplet2, and click Create:
   
5. Get the IP address of your droplet:
   
6. SSH into it:

   ssh root@108.101.101.116

   

7. Create a new user, e.g. thibaud, with administrative privileges (the built-in group wheel is allowed sudo), and switch to it:

   adduser thibaud
   passwd thibaud
   gpasswd -a thibaud wheel
   su thibaud
   cd ~

   

8. Setup SSH for that user (I will use the same key setup earlier):

   mkdir ~/.ssh/
   chmod 700 ~/.ssh/
   sudo cp /root/.ssh/authorized_keys .ssh/
   sudo chown thibaud .ssh/authorized_keys
   chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

   

9. Disallow SSH as root (uncomment PermitRootLogin, and change it from yes to no):

   sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
   PermitRootLogin no

   

   Note: to use vim, move with the cursor until you reach the desired location, press INSERT to enter edit mode, change the text as desired, press ESC to return to command mode, type :wq and press ENTER to write your changes to file and quit.

10. Restart the SSH service:

    sudo systemctl reload sshd

    

We now have a droplet ready to use.

2. Preparation

In this step, we will install the JDK, PostgreSQL, and the Grid database, as shown in part 6bis.

1. Install the JDK:

   sudo yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel

   

2. Install PostgreSQL:

   sudo yum install postgresql-server

   

   sudo postgresql-setup initdb

   

3. Setup password authentication (change these two host lines from ident to md5):

   sudo vi /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf

   

4. Start PostgreSQL, and enable it on reboot:

   sudo systemctl start postgresql
   sudo systemctl enable postgresql

   

5. Change the password of user postgres and create the InforIONGrid database:

   sudo -i -u postgres psql -c "ALTER USER postgres with encrypted password 'password123';"
   sudo -i -u postgres createdb InforIONGrid
   

   

6. Create the user and group for the Grid service:

   sudo groupadd grid
   sudo useradd -g grid grid

   

The droplet is now ready to install the Grid.

3. Install the Grid

In this step, we will install the Grid in unattended installation mode as shown in part 4bis.

1. Copy the Grid installer to somewhere in the droplet, e.g. ~/Downloads/:

   mkdir ~/Downloads/
   exit
   exit
   scp ~/Downloads/installer-1.13.77.jar thibaud@108.101.101.116:~/Downloads/
   ssh thibaud@108.101.101.116

   

2. Create a template file installer.properties:

   java -jar ~/Downloads/installer-1.13.77.jar -console -options-template ~/Downloads/installer.properties

   

3. Set the following properties (change the IP address and hostname accordingly; use a text editor, e.g. vim):

   install.path=/opt/Infor/InforIONGrid
   jdk.path=/usr/lib/jvm/java-openjdk
   database.jdbc=jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/InforIONGrid
   database.username=postgres
   database.password=password123
   database.schema=public
   grid.externaladdress=108.101.101.116
   grid.hostname=droplet2
   grid.internaladdress=droplet2
   service.username=grid
   service.group=grid
   

   

4. Install the Grid in silent mode:

   sudo java -jar ~/Downloads/installer-1.13.77.jar -console -options ~/Downloads/installer.properties

   

5. Check the log files if needed.
6. Ensure all the Grid nodes are listening:

   netstat -an | grep :5000 | grep LISTEN

   

7. Verify the Grid status is Started:

   curl http://localhost:50002/status

   

Result

The result is a usual Grid, on a cloud:

Firewall

To setup the firewall to block all incoming connections except SSH and Grid https port 50000:

sudo systemctl start firewalld
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=ssh
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=50000/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --reload
sudo systemctl enable firewalld
sudo systemctl status firewalld

Next

The droplet is publicly available on the Internet. At this point you should secure it as per your needs, for example with DMZ and VPN. Here are Infor’s installation topology considerations, recommended installation scenarios, and network topology considerations. To make your cloud private, set it up in a private subnet.

GitHub

I put it all together in the install.sh script on my GitHub.

Future work

• Install Grid session providers
• Install GDBC
• Install Grid applications
• Grid pentesting
• Proof-of-concept of Grid database on homomorphic encryption with CryptDB or Microsoft’s Always Encrypted SQL Server

Conclusion

That was an illustration of how to install the Infor ION Grid on a virtual [private] cloud as a laboratory for learning purposes, using DigitalOcean as the cloud provider. The installation is remote with SSH, no graphical user interface.

Related posts

• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 1 – early Grid version 0.x
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 2 – latest Grid version 11.x
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 2bis – Configuration Manager
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 3 – Cryptographic keys
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 4 – Grid installer
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 4bis – Console and silent install
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 5 – PostgreSQL database
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 6 – Ubuntu Linux
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 6bis – CentOS Linux
• Building an Infor Grid Lab – Part 7 – Virtual Private Cloud