Getting Started with BrickStor SP RackTop’s Cyberstorage software, BrickStor SP, is a secure-software defined NAS platform for unstructured data. Users deploy data-centric zero trust architecture to ensure compliance and stop cyberthreats in real-time. BrickStor SP Initial Configuration The following instructions will guide initial configuration of the BrickStor SP Console on first install. Installing BrickStor SP The following steps will outline the process of installing the BrickStor SP Manager to a system. If the BrickStor SP Manager is being installed over a Virtual Machine Environment, navigate to Installing the BrickStor SP on a Virtual Machine The BrickStor SP Console While navigating the BrickStor SP Console, use Tab to navigate while editing fields. Use Arrow Keys to navigate to different fields on the Main Menu. Upon first boot, the BrickStor SP Console will launch. A message will direct the setting of the root password before using the appliance. Setting a Root Password The following instructions will guide the creation of the Root Password. While at the Status Screen, press Enter. The Change Root Password screen will present. In the supplied fields, enter a new Root Password. Press Tab. Enter the same Root Password in the Confirm Password field to confirm this change. Press Tab Press Enter to apply changes, and set the new Root Password. A message denoting a successful Root Password change will present, press Enter to proceed. Accepting Terms and Conditions The BrickStor SP console will now prompt for Terms & Conditions Acceptance While on the BrickStor SP Console Status screen, ensuring the 'Fix It' prompt is present, press Enter. The Terms and Conditions Screen will present. Read through the Terms and Conditions of the BrickStor SP License. When finished, press Enter. Enter user name in the supplied field. Press Enter. Configuring Management Network If your appliance has obtained a network address using DHCP, you can skip this section and proceed to Registration. In the BrickStor SP console, A message will present noting the system as not registered. Press F3. The following menu will present. Ensuring Configure Management Network is highlighted, press Enter. The Configure Management Network screen will present. Enter the following information: IP Address Netmask Gateway Nameservers (It is recommended to add a minimum of two) Press Tab to select Save. Press Enter. Alternatively, it is possible to utilize DHCP to Configure Management Network. Press Tab to navigate to Return to Status. Press Enter. Once finished, the BrickStor SP Console Initial Configuration has been completed. Registration Online Registration In order to register BrickStor SP online, a license entitlement is needed for each installation. An entitlement is obtained by purchasing BrickStor SP software license. To view current entitlement login to myRackTop portal https://www.myracktop.com and navigate to the Entitlements page. Network must be configured for online registration. To register a new BrickStor SP online complete the following steps: Boot the New BrickStor SP After the initial boot of a new system the console will display the URL to register the appliance. Navigate to that URL to continue with the registration process. Enter customer ID, then click Register Now. The registration URL will present. Click the provided link. Follow the on-screen instructions to be taken to the list of entitlements. Select an entitlement from the list and click License Now. Once an entitlement is assigned to an appliance, it cannot be reused unless the appliance is deleted from the portal. The licenses are applied to the Brickstor SP and it is registered. The following will show on the BrickStor SP Console during Portal registration. The console of the BrickStor SP will now present a prompt. Offline Registration In order to register BrickStor SP offline, a license entitlement is needed for each installation. An entitlement is obtained by purchasing BrickStor SP software license. To view current entitlement login to MyRackTop portal https://www.myracktop.com and navigate to the Entitlements page. Offline Registration is used only when the BrickStor SP device is not connected to the internet. Boot the New BrickStor Follow the URL and enter credentials to login. After entering customer ID, An offline registration key will present. Copy and paste this key into the Add Offline Appliance option on https://www.myracktop.com. The Add Offline Appliance button can be found in the top right of the screen, on the Appliances tab. Click Add to register the BrickStor SP. The BrickStor SP is now registered and ready for an entitlement to be assigned. A list of entitlements will present and can select which one you wish to assign to that system and click License Now. The license details screen will present. At the top of this list there will be a Download Registration button, click that to obtain the offline registration file. Take this file and upload it on the main BrickStor SP homepage. All licenses and certificates will automatically be applied to the system. The BrickStor SP homepage will refresh automatically and prompt the creation of a new password. After creating a new password, a prompt will direct a fresh login to the BrickStor SP homepage. The console of the BrickStor SP will now be at the login prompt. Return to Installing BrickStor SP. Using BrickStor SP Manager BrickStor SP has a user interface entitled BrickStor SP Manager that can be used to perform administrative, management, analysis, and auditing tasks. BrickStor SP Manager can manage multiple BrickStor SP appliances. BrickStor SP Manager runs on Microsoft Windows. To download and use BrickStor SP Manager, use a web browser and enter the IP address or host name of the appliance. The default web page on the appliance contains downloadable links to the BrickStor SP Manager along with some other resources discussed later in this guide. The BrickStor SP Manager zip file can be extracted into any folder and will run as a standalone client without an install. The brickstorspmgr.exe file in the extracted folder is the executable program. To log into a BrickStor SP appliance via BrickStor SP Manager: Run brickstorspmgr.exe by double clicking it. Click Add Connection to add a connection to a BrickStor SP appliance. In the Add Connection dialog box, enter the following: For authentication server, enter the system’s IP address or host name. Enter your username. Enter your password. Optionally, select whether to have BrickStor SP Manager save your password for subsequent logins. If you have already connected a BrickStor instance, click login for that instance. In the Connect To dialog box, do the following: Verify the system’s IP address. Verify your username. Enter your password. Optionally, select whether to have BrickStor SP Manager save your password for subsequent logins. BrickStor SP Manager Overview BrickStor SP Manager provides the user interface for configuring and managing your BrickStor deployment. BrickStor SP Manager is a responsive and context-aware interface that allows for management of the BrickStor SP at a granular level. The BrickStor SP Manager is capable of managing a single BrickStor SP or multiple appliances. The topics that follow provide a basic interface tour that this guide will build upon in subsequent topics: General User Layout and Conventions The Rack View Interface General User Layout and Conventions The BrickStor SP Manager interface is divided into three panes which are described below: the Connections pane the Details pane the Changes pane Connections Pane The Connections pane allows you to connect to BrickStor appliances, and navigate their pools and datasets. Details Pane The Details pane allows you to configure and manage storage, security, and compliance features. The tabs and menus available in the Details pane are based on the selection made in the Connections pane. When the top-level Appliance/Node is selected, the system displays different menu tabs than when a pool or dataset is selected for example. Also, certain tabs, such as user behavior, will not be visible if the feature is not enabled. The hierarchy of the Connections and tabs is Appliance, then Pool, and then Dataset. If a menu such as user behavior is selected at the pool level, the system will display all activity related to the pool. However, if you select it at the dataset level, the scope will be narrowed to the dataset. Menus and tabs are relative to position within the interface. Instead of taking a deep dive into the Details pane here, this documentation covers the tabs and menus herein where it aligns with particular features. Changes Pane After you make any configuration changes, they appear in the Changes pane for final review and commit. BrickStor SP Manager does not make actual changes to BrickStor until you commit those changes. Changes that make data unavailable or destroy data require you to acknowledge the possible negative effects before the commit button becomes active. NOTE: Changes to high availability and resource group movements are not processed through the commit queue. Main Menu In the BrickStor SP Manager title bar, you can access the following options: About Menu Search Menu View Menu About Menu The About Menu displays BrickStor SP Manager information. By setting a value, for example 5GB, in the Trace Query and Commit box will create a local log on the machine running BrickStor SP Manager with all of the GUI requests and responses. Search Menu The Search Menu allows you to search through your current BrickStor appliance for pools, datasets, etc. View Menu The View Menu allows you to change the BrickStor SP Manager layout. You can choose between Tab View (default) and Flow View, which displays all sections next to each other. You can also view forecast data for the system. Tab view is recommended for normal administration on small screens. Finally, you can adjust Zoom properties, which change the width of columns in all views. The Rack View Interface Rack View displays a graphical representation of your current BrickStor hardware, including any controllers, enclosures, and drives that are within these appliances. To access Rack View, choose the the appliance in the Connections pane, then click the Rack View link at the bottom of the Details pane. Accessing Rack View You can use Rack View to easily view and modify your appliance hardware. Rack View allows users to add or modify pools and vdevs and gives visuals that allow users to see what changes will occur to the system’s hardware prior to committing them. It will also display various diagnostic information such as the values of temperature sensors in the system and the fan speeds. On the upper right-hand side, you can select which appliance you want to zoom to. The appliance will be highlighted in yellow when the mouse is hovered over it and left clicking will zoom to the appliance. The right-hand side of Rack View also allows you to group the drives in the appliances based on certain properties such as pool, make, and vdev type. To change the grouping type, select the dropdown under Group Drives By and then select how you want to group them. When hovering over one of these groups, affiliated drives will be highlighted and left clicking will zoom to the drives. You can also expand these groups with the arrow and select individual drives that are a part of the group. Accessing Rack View You can access Rack View from either the Connections or the Details pane. Accessing Rack View from the Connections pane To access Rack View from the Connections pane, complete the following steps: From the Connections pane, select either the appliance level or the pool level. Right-click and choose one of the following options: At the appliance level, right-click and select Open Rack View. At the pool level, right-click and select Open Pool Rack View. Accessing Rack View from the Details Pane To access Rack View, complete the following steps: From the Connections pane, select either the appliance level or the pool level. In the lower portion of the details pane, click Rack View. Toggling Identifying Lights Rack View allows you to toggle a physical indicating light on each drive to assist with identifying the correct drives on the machine. You can either select one drive by clicking directly on in it Rack View, or multiple drives using the Group Drives By interface on the right-hand side. Once the appropriate drives have been selected click the ident on button at the bottom of the screen. This will bring up the Enable bay indicator LEDs dialog box, where you can turn on the lights for either the selected bays, bays with unknown drives, or bays without drives. You can also choose to disable all other indicator lights to ensure only the desired drives have their lights enabled. Drives with their indicating LEDs enabled will have a blinking orange indicator on Rack View as well as on the physical drive on the appliance. To disable the identifying lights, select the desired drives like before and click the ident off button. This will bring up the Disable bay indicator LEDs dialog box where you can turn off the lights on either the selected bays, bays with unknown drives, bays without drives, or all bays in general. General Appliance Information BrickStor SP Manager allows you view all current problems and warnings with the node and its imported pools. From this view you can see which pools are currently imported and exported on the selected BrickStor instance. Viewing General Appliance Information To view BrickStor general information, complete the following steps: From the Connections pane, select the appliance level. In the details pane, select the General tab. Appliance Sharing Information At the appliance level, the Sharing tab allows you to view all shares currently on an appliance by protocol. In addition, you can view if the datasets are encrypted and on self-encrypting drives. This view also provides a status of the protocol services and health. Viewing Appliance Sharing Information To view BrickStor Sharing information at the appliance level, complete the following steps: From the Connections pane, select the appliance level. In the details pane, select the Sharing tab. Network Information BrickStor SP Manager allows you to view all of the interfaces in your BrickStor deployment. A healthy system should display a green status indicator for all vnics. Each interface displays the IP, interface name, physical interface or aggregate where the vnic resides, MTU size, and port speed. Viewing Network Information To view BrickStor network information, complete the following steps: From the Connections pane, select the appliance level. In the details pane, select the Network tab. System Information BrickStor SP Manager allows you to view system information, service status, and the BrickStor operating systems available for download and installation. On the service tab, you can find your customer ID, Serial Number and the running version of the OS when calling support. From this admins can all power off and reboot the node as well as access compliance reports. It is from this tab that the admin configures the HA Cluster once the command line steps have been completed. See HA Cluster Configuration for cluster setup details. Viewing System Information To view BrickStor system information, complete the following steps: From the Connections pane, select the appliance level. In the details pane, select the System tab. Installing the BrickStor SP on a Virtual Machine The BrickStor SP Console will provide an Admin URL, as well as an Access Code located at the bottom of the home page. With an open internet browser, enter the Admin URL into the url and press Enter. A screen will prompt the input of an Access Code. The Access Code is located within the BrickStor SP Console. Once the Access Code has been entered, click the Login button. The installer Home page will present. This page displays three buttons: Install - Install a new instance of the BrickStor SP Manager. Factory Reset - Reset the system to factory condition. Reboot/Shutdown - Reboot or Power off the System. The End User License Agreement screen will present. After reading the End User License Agreement, click the empty field provided below, and enter the name of the EULA acceptor. I [FIRSTNAME LASTNAME] ACCEPT THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS. Once finished, click the Accept button to proceed. A green checkmark next to Accept EULA will be present upon success. The Select Boot Device screen will present. Select the Primary and Secondary boot devices by clicking the provided fields and selecting from the provided options. If the correct boot device option is not present, click the Refresh Devices button, and try again. Once the correct primary and secondary boot devices have been selected, click the Next button. For disk selection only 1 disk is needed for Virtual Machine installations. For bare-metal installations, two drives are strongly encouraged. When secondary disk is selected, a drive mirror (RAID-1) will be created for redundancy. Secondary drives must be of the same type and capacity. SAS, SATA and NVMe device types are supported, but cannot be mixed. A green checkmark next to Select boot device will be present upon success. The Set Admin Password screen will present. The user root will populate in the provided User field. Enter the Password in the provided field. Enter the same password in the following field to Confirm. Once finished, click the Next button. A green checkmark next to Set admin password will be present upon success. The Install screen will present. Click the Install button to begin installation. A progress bar, and description of the installation process will present. Once the progress bar has filled, a prompt denoting a system reboot will present. A prompt will present denoting successful installation, click the Reboot button. When Installing a new instance of the BrickStor SP Manager, click the Install button, and repeat the above installation steps. To Reboot the System, click the Reboot button on the home scree, then click Reboot. Joining Active Directory BrickStor SP appliance is capable of integrating into an existing Active Directory environment, which allows for share permissions and administration delegation to reference users and groups in Active Directory. To associate user and group permissions on shares, directories and files with user and group objects in the Active Directory, the appliance must first be joined to the Active Directory Domain. Active Directory Join Prerequisites A number of basic requirements must be met before domain join can succeed. Working Domain Name Service (name resolution), For resiliency, having two or more Domain Controllers is strongly advised. Configured NTP. Accurate and reliable time-keeping with clocks synchronized between the BrickStor SP appliance and Domain Controllers. Endpoints/client connection to BSR using AD authentication for SMB/NFS services are also required to have clock synched with AD. Account username/password with proper access to perform the Active Directory joining. Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) (ex: example.com) of the domain to be joined. Configuring NTP It is a best practice to configure domain joined BrickStor SP appliance with specific domain group(s) to allow management access. This will allow group members to access BrickStor SP Manager using domain logins. Run setup. The main menu will present itself, select option 5, Configure NTP settings. $ setup RackTop Cyberconverged NAS Setup Utility Copyright 2021 RackTop Systems, Inc. Main Menu 1. Configure RMM interface. 2. Configure nodename. 3. Configure network interface. 4. Configure aggregate network interface. 5. Configure NTP settings. <- Select this option 6. Configure DNS settings. 7. Disable system service connections to the Internet. 8. Configure TimeZone. 9. Restart appliance. 10. System Information and Administration. 11. Exit Setup Utility. Select menu option and press enter or press enter to exit. Use CTRL-C to exit at anytime. Next, select option 1, View current NTP settings. This will present the currently configured NTP server(s). On a brand new system the output is going to resemble the following: Missing NTP servers, consider adding at least one. Press enter to continue. If there are already configured NTP servers and the time is synchronized with the Active Directory Domain Controllers, the system is ready to join to the Active Directory. Otherwise, be sure to configure NTP servers. For VM deployments: Avoid using configuration to synchronize VM clock with the hypervisor and use NTP instead. If changes are necessary: Press Enter Run setup again, the main menu will present itself. Select option 5, Configure NTP settings. Instead of option 1, after choosing to configure NTP settings, select option 2, Configure NTP settings. A prompt will direct the input of the IP address of an NTP server; alternatively, it is possible to use DNS names as well. A prompt will follow to confirm these inputs. option 2, Configure NTP settings is additive, each time it is chosen and an address or DNS name is entered, this address or DNS name will be appended to the list. This list may or may not be empty, It is possible to adjust this list with option 3, Remove NTP Server. RackTop Cyberconverged NAS Setup Utility Copyright 2021 RackTop Systems, Inc. NTP Configuration Menu 1. View current NTP settings. 2. Configure NTP settings. 3. Remove NTP Server. 4. Verify NTP Server request and synchronization. Please select menu option and press enter or press enter to return to main menu. 2 NTP Server IP Address: ad1.example.com Is the above NTP Server IP Address correct? (options: y or n): Microsoft Active Directory default maximum tolerance for computer clock synchronization is 5 minutes, however, it is a configurable setting so it can vary in some environments. In many cases Active Directory Domain Controllers are also DNS and NTP servers. The following steps will outline the process of joining the Active Directory using the BrickStor SP Manager: With the BrickStor SP Manager open, navigate to the System tab. Navigate to the Domain Support Tab. Check the box to Modify/Repair Domain Membership. Enter the intended domain name to be joined. Enter the user name of the domain user with sufficient domain join privileges. Managing BrickStor SP with AD Users BrickStor SP can be configured to allow specified Active Directory groups to login to BrickStor SP Manager and administer the appliance. This is useful in order to track changes made to a BrickStor SP via the [Audit Log]. Ensure prerequisites are satisfied concerning the Active Directory Server. Join system to the domain, or, ensure the system has already been joined to the domain. The following steps will outline the process of joining the Active Directory via the BrickStor SP Manager: With the BrickStor SP Manager open, navigate to the System tab. Navigate to the Domain Support Tab. Click to expand the Admin Group section. Click Add Admin Group Search for and select the group that is to be granted Active Directory Credentials. Click Add Admin Group A group may also be removed from Active Directory permissions. To do this, follow the above steps to select the Admin Group that is to be removed. Once selected, click Remove Admin Group.