Accessing the Host Operating System

After you complete the ztC Edge deployment, you can access the host operating system (CentOS) locally at the PM's physical console, or you can access it remotely by using a secure shell (SSH) client.

To log on to the host operating system with an SSH client, use the management IP address specified during deployment (or supplied by the DHCP server, if the interface was configured for DHCP during deployment). If needed, you can locate the management IP address for a PM as described in this topic.

Caution: Do not update the CentOS host operating system of the ztC Edge system from any source other than Stratus. Use only the release that is installed with the Stratus Redundant Linux software.
Note: To ensure that administrative commands will work properly, log on to the physical console or IP address of the primary PM (unless you specifically need to operate on components in the secondary PM of a dual-node system). Do not connect to the system IP address, as it can move from PM to PM.
Note: The default password for the root account is KeepRunning. To secure the system, change the root password on each PM as soon as possible. The first time you log on to a PM as root, the system automatically prompts you to change the password. To change the password again in the future, issue the passwd command on each PM.

For information about using third-party management tools in the host operating system, see Third-party Management Tools.

  1. Click Preferences in the left-hand navigation panel to open the Preferences page.
  2. Under System, click IP Configuration.
  3. Record the IP address of each PM, node0 and node1 (if present).
  4. Click Physical Machines in the left-hand navigation panel to open the Physical Machines page.
  5. Record which PM is the primary node for the system, displayed as noden (primary). In most cases, log on to the IP address of the primary node to ensure that administrative commands will work properly.

You can download and use PuTTY, a suite of open-source SSH clients:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

In particular, the putty.exe client allows you access a shell to execute programs on the command line of the host operating system. PuTTY also includes the pscp.exe command-line utility that allows you to securely transfer files from a remote system to the host operating system.

If you prefer a secure copy (SCP) client with a graphical user interface, you can also try the open-source WinSCP utility:

http://winscp.net/eng/index.php

On many Linux- and UNIX-based systems, SSH utilities are already installed and enabled by default. See ssh(1) and scp(1) for information about how to use these utilities.