Skyminer Skywire Installation Guide
This guide assumes that you have read and understood the readme.md do every step exactly the way it is described. Misconduct will lead to the inability to connect and to potential reflashing.
This guide covers the installation of Skywire from source or by using our prepared images specifically designed for the orange pi prime or other H5 boards.
For stable operation of Skywire, we suggest not deploying Skyminer to any type of public network, including those in cafés, on-campus sites, in offices etc.
To ensure stable operation of the Skywire software, we suggest to not deploy a Skywire node:
- in any type of public network
- on-campus sites
- in offices
- etc.
The first bootup process of a Skywire node takes some time to finish the initialization. Please do not switch the node off unless at least 5 minutes have passed. Turning it off prior to the initialization process being finished may result in corruption of the micro SD card, therefore demanding reflashing of the image.
Depending on the installation setup procedure you'd like to follow, different requirements are given.
- Skyflash and Skybian (Skyflash will download Skybian for you!)
- Orange Pi Prime or similar board with H5 chip.
- Micro sd card adapter + sd card reader.
- Any computer running a Linux distribution.
- Please refer to our skywug user forum for installation guides of other OS/DIY guides in general.
This section covers the installation of Skywire. Three options are being presented:
- the first option is using the prepared Skybian images
- the second option is building the Skybian images using Skyflash
- the last option guides you through the installation from source.
Follow this guide if you need any help using it.
We are very happy to announce that Skybian and Skyflash have now been released and are ready for usage. Anybody that was using the previously used prepared images is advised to reflash & use Skybian.
Skybian is our custom OS built upon Armbian and comes with Skywire and its dependencies preinstalled. It can be used on any Orange Pi Prime and is the preferred way to install Skywire on an official Skyminer. Please use the Installation from Source section if you do not have an Orange Pi Prime!
Skyflash is our custom flashing & configuration software for adjusting the Skybian image to your needs - it will enable you to use any IP ranges you need and flash the built images on your micro sd cards.
You can find the user guide and installation instructions for Skyflash in the Skyflash User Guide. Skyflash manages the download of Skybian, you do not have to manually download it manually!
We are providing eight (8) prepared Skybian images that are ready to use in the official Skyminer. You can find them here.
The default Skybian root user password is skybian.
It is important to note that they come with the default static IP configuration of the official Skyminer, i.e. they operate in the 192.168.0.0/24 subnetwork:
- manager: 192.168.0.2
- node 1: 192.168.0.3
- node 2: 192.168.0.4
- node 3: 192.168.0.5
- node 4: 192.168.0.6
- node 5: 192.168.0.7
- node 6: 192.168.0.8
- node 7: 192.168.0.9
Please contact support on Telegram or via the support ticket form if you are not sure on whether you can use them or not. Anybody that knows that they do need different should use Skyflash for building images that meet the requirements of their custom IP settings. Refer to the following section for details.
To install Skywire using the prepared Skybian images you only need a flashing software. We advise you to use balenaEtcher since it's a cross-platform tool and does not confuse the user with too many options. Please download the images, extract them and flash them on your micro SD cards one by one. It is important that you note down which image is running on which micro SD card! This alleviates potential troubleshooting steps tremendously.
Skywire is preinstalled on the images and they automatically start the Skywire manager (only the manager image) and node processes respectively.
- Verification that your nodes are online using this guide.
- Setup the port-forwarding rules by using the networking guide. It was written for the official Skyminer but you can use it as guidance since the port-forwarding rules specified are universal to the Skywire software.
Please note that you can either build the images yourself or make use of the prepared Skybian images. If you do not change the default network configuration there is no difference!
The IP settings you should use as official Skyminer owners are the default settings that Skyflash comes with. Here they are for double-checking:
- Network gateway:
192.168.0.1 - Network DNS:
1.0.0.1, 1.1.1.1 - Manager IP:
192.168.0.2 - Node count:
7(Do not enter 8 here, the manager is not included since it is being built in any case!)
After flashing please make sure that Skybian is connected to the currently active discovery server. If not please perform these steps.
Once the configuration & flashing of Skybian using Skyflash is done you have two options:
- Option 1: connect only the manager and nodes 1-6 to the Skyminer router and use the 8th port for your computer/laptop.
- By choosing option 1 you won't be able to view all 8 nodes in the manager since one LAN port of the Skyminer router will be used for your computer/laptop to connect to it. You are advised to setup the port-forwarding rules immediately after you're done with this guide.
- Option 2: use the networking guide to prepare your router to enable access from within your home network via port-forwarding rules.
This section will cover the setup choosing option 1.
Independent on the option you choose to proceed with, you need to make sure you don't have IP subnet conflicts as mentioned in the disclaimer up top. Your home network needs to be different than 192.168.0.0/24.*
Make sure that all the switches next to Orange Pi and on the socket are OFF.
Plugin all previously flashed micro sd cards and connect the orange pi primes to the LAN ports of the Skyminer router.
Please connect the power cable, then turn on the socket switch and wait until all of the LEDs on the router go off. This indicates that the first bootup process of the router is finished. Some router models continue to light up the two LEDs on the bottom right. Please ignore this if they don't go off after 5 minutes.
Connect the Skyminer WAN port to one of the LAN ports of your home router - the WAN port LED should light up. Turn on the switch of the Skywire Manager node and wait until its LAN status LED lights up on Skyminer router before carrying out the next step. After that, turn on the switches of other nodes one by one with a recommended interval of 15 seconds between booting any two nodes. When all the 8 LAN LEDs on Skyminer router are lighted up, all the nodes have booted up successfully.
Now you can unplug the Ethernet cable of a non-manager node (Orange Pi Prime with Skybian node image) and connect your computer/laptop to the vacant port in order to manage your nodes in the browser.
- Verification that your nodes are online using this guide.
- Setup the port-forwarding rules by using the networking guide. It was written for the official Skyminer but you can use it as guidance since the port-forwarding rules specified are universal to the Skywire software.
Please refer to the Skywire Manager Web Interface User Guide for using the Skywire software via the web interface.
In case you're trying to install the software on a SBC you are advised to install a Linux distribution of your choice before continuing with this guide. An alternative would be to use our prepared images.
The following steps were performed on the Armbian Ubuntu Server image but they work on any other Debian distribution as well. It is necessary that you are able to connect to your boards via SSH for performing the installation steps. If you have troubles finding the IP of your board(s) that you are trying to set up, check out this guide to find the IP address(es).
Log in via SSH, default password is often 1234.
First, update and upgrade via
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
Next, install the dependencies:
sudo apt-get install -y curl git mercurial make binutils gcc bzr bison libgmp3-dev screen gcc build-essential
Download the respective Golang (Go) version matching your CPU, the following commands are for 64-bit ARM architectures (e.g. orange pi prime, orange pi zero plus etc.):
cd ~
curl -sS https://dl.google.com/go/go1.13.6.linux-arm64.tar.gz > go$1.13.6.linux-arm64.tar.gz
tar xvf go1.13.6.linux-arm64.tar.gz
rm go1.13.6.linux-arm64.tar.gz
Dependent on the boards (e.g. orange pi zero etc.) you're using you might have to use the following Golang version:
cd ~
curl -sS https://dl.google.com/go/go1.13.6.linux-armv6l.tar.gz > go$1.13.6.linux-armv6l.tar.gz
tar xvf go1.13.6.linux-armv6l.tar.gz
rm go1.13.6.linux-armv6l.tar.gz
Next, you have to install Go, create symbolic links and create Go directories:
sudo mv go /usr/local/go
sudo ln -s /usr/local/go/bin/go /usr/local/bin/go
sudo ln -s /usr/local/go/bin/godoc /usr/local/bin/godoc
sudo ln -s /usr/local/go/bin/gofmt /usr/local/bin/gofmt
mkdir -p $HOME/go/{bin,pkg,src}
Next, set up the environment variables in .bashrc:
cd ~
nano .bashrc
This opens .bashrc in the nano text editor. Paste the following lines at the end of the file:
export GOROOT=/usr/local/go
export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export GOBIN=$GOPATH/bin
export PATH=$PATH:$GOBIN
Save .bashrc via ctrl+x and y and then activate your changes via:
source ~/.bashrc
Download the files from the GitHub repository:
mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/skycoin
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/skycoin
git clone https://github.com/skycoin/skywire.git
Install Skywire using the following commands:
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/skycoin/skywire/cmd
go install -v ./...
That's it, the installation of Skywire is finished. Test your installation by running a manager and node process as described in the readme. Verification steps that your nodes are online are outlined in this guide.
Please refer to the Skywire Manager Web Interface User Guide for using the Skywire software via the web interface.
Simply refer to the Network Configuration section of the Skyflash User Guide and rebuilt your images with your desired IP addresses.
This section includes old versions of this article that may still be useful to some of our users.
- Verification that your nodes are online using this guide.
- Setup the port-forwarding rules by using the networking guide. It was written for the official Skyminer but you can use it as guidance since the port-forwarding rules specified are universal to the Skywire software.
- Continue with updating Debian 8 to 9 by performing these instructions.
- Next, you can upgrade your images to include the new manager user interface by executing the one time upgrade script.