Installing on a VPS

Some cloud providers do not allow you to upload a disk image directly to their servers, which can make installing systems like NethSecurity 8 difficult.

You can work around this limitation by installing a Linux distribution (CentOS, Rocky, Alma, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian) that includes the dd, zcat, and curl tools.

These tools let you download, decompress, and write the image directly to the VPS disk.

Main steps

1. Download the image: use curl to fetch the latest stable image.
2. Write the image to disk: decompress and write it directly to the VPS disk with zcat and dd.
3. Reboot the VPS: after the image write completes, reboot the machine to start NethSecurity.

Example installation on a VPS (Digital Ocean)

The following is a practical example of how to install NethSecurity 8 on a Digital Ocean Droplet.

Note: the disk device name may vary depending on the cloud provider. In this example it is /dev/vda.

Use lsblk to list block devices and identify the VPS disk name.

1. Download the compressed NethSecurity image into the VPS /tmp directory:

   curl -o /tmp/nsec.img.gz "https://updates.nethsecurity.nethserver.org/stable/8-24.10.0-ns.1.6.0/targets/x86/64/nethsecurity-8-24.10.0-ns.1.6.0-x86-64-generic-squashfs-combined-efi.img.gz"

2. Decompress the image with zcat and write it directly to disk with dd.

   It is important to note that in this example the disk is /dev/vda. If the disk has a different name, for example /dev/sda or /dev/nvme0n1, adjust the command accordingly.

   zcat /tmp/nsec.img.gz 2>/dev/null | dd of=/dev/vda bs=1M iflag=fullblock conv=fsync status=progress

3. Reboot the machine

   reboot -f