Setting Up the Local VM Scanner on Linux

Aikido VM Scanner is a single-package that installs on your system, automatically scanning and identifying dependencies to provide a detailed view into your environment.

Prerequisites

• Minimum system requirements: at least 1GB RAM.

• Preferred system requirements: at least 2GB RAM and 4 CPUs.

• Ensure you have sudo / admin privileges on your system

• Make sure to use the appropriate commands for your system or cloud provider

• If you need to run with root, place the AIKIDO_TOKEN env var after sudo, like this: sudo AIKIDO_TOKEN=REPLACE_ME <install_command>

Installation and Upgrade

Make sure you run as sudo and replace AIKIDO_TOKEN with valid token from Local VM scanning page in Aikido. To specify the VM environment (that you will see later in Aikido), you can also set the VM_TYPE variable as one of: production, staging or development.

The VM Scanner Agent runs once a day, at a random time between 4:00 AM - 8:00 AM (machine time).

After install, a first scan will start automatically. If you want to run it on demand, you can manually execute:

/opt/aikido-vm-scanner-1.3.5/aikido-vm-scanner

For Red Hat-based Systems (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora)

x86_64

AIKIDO_TOKEN=REPLACE_ME VM_TYPE=production dnf install -y https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1.3.5/aikido-vm-scanner.x86_64.rpm

Hash	aikido-vm-scanner.x86_64.rpm
MD5	306cae411f70ed4c7f9cc4c7bf3f1451
SHA256	9acfb892050593ac382c2a2d281e1eb5f289049f85b66754c9fdce150426228a

aarch64

AIKIDO_TOKEN=REPLACE_ME VM_TYPE=production dnf install -y https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1.3.5/aikido-vm-scanner.aarch64.rpm

Hash	aikido-vm-scanner.aarch64.rpm
MD5	e590559a2dbc820f77f31ad2664cf7c5
SHA256	9e0e556b0f00c2691ea26f37041058dd023f9402322c8a2eb1e337e4af025705

For Debian-based Systems (Debian, Ubuntu)

We support Debian >= 10 and Ubuntu >= 20.04.

x86_64

curl -L -O https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1.3.5/aikido-vm-scanner.amd64.deb
AIKIDO_TOKEN=REPLACE_ME VM_TYPE=production apt-get install -y ./aikido-vm-scanner.amd64.deb

Hash	aikido-vm-scanner.amd64.deb
MD5	109e072c098daeb355cc726a73809a68
SHA256	f02aff38f0a6430de71f60e557ebcbb9be0951cae19b5c9fec0a0f401881fca2

aarch64

curl -L -O https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1.3.5/aikido-vm-scanner.arm64.deb
AIKIDO_TOKEN=REPLACE_ME VM_TYPE=production apt-get install -y ./aikido-vm-scanner.arm64.deb

Hash	aikido-vm-scanner.arm64.deb
MD5	b0a58fc455a6cb5bdecd48b9db1f8137
SHA256	3721c1a412d4c90f7a5705fe4527058a4038c0990bbb90d6ab708a54674e3f17

Latest version

If you have an automated install process and you always want to be on the latest version as soon as we release it, you can replace the version in the install link with latest:

• https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/aikido-vm-scanner.x86_64.rpm

• https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/aikido-vm-scanner.aarch64.rpm

• https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/aikido-vm-scanner.amd64.deb

• https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/latest/aikido-vm-scanner.arm64.deb

Additional Configuration

Token setup

If for any reason you can't set the AIKIDO_TOKEN at install time, you can set the token post install in one of two ways:

• Paste the token in /opt/aikido-vm-scanner-1.3.5/.token

• Change the contents of /opt/aikido-vm-scanner-1.3.5/config.json :

{
    "api_key": "AIKIDO_TOKEN_HERE",
    "exclude": []
}

Hostname change

By default, we automatically get the hostname for the scanned machine and submit that to Aikido, in order to be displayed in the Virtual Machines tab.

If you want to change the reported hostname, you can do that using the configuration file:

{
    "hostname": "YOUR_HOSTNAME_HERE",
    "exclude": []
}

Exclude files or paths

In the config.json you can exclude files and paths by adding additional items to the exclude list. You can find some examples below.

• Exclude a single file in a directory:

{
    "exclude": [
        ...
        "./home/testing/app/package.json",
    ]
}

• Exclude all releases subdirectories:

{
    "exclude": [
            ...
            "./home/testing/*/releases",
    ]
}

• Exclude all .json files in the out folder and all subdirectories:

{
    "exclude": [
        ...
        "./out/**/*.json",
    ]
}

• Exclude catalogers from scanning (eg: exclude Golang catalogers):

{
    "exclude": [
    ],
    "select_catalogers": "-go"
}

Output channel

If you want to control the output channel of the VM scanner, when installing you can specify the OUTPUT variable as stdout, stderr or none.

Example for rpm x86_64:

AIKIDO_TOKEN=REPLACE_ME VM_TYPE=production OUTPUT=stderr dnf install -y https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1.3.5/aikido-vm-scanner.x86_64.rpm

This option does not affect the disk logs. These are created no matter what this setting is.

Disable initial scan

When a rpm/deb package is installed, it automatically triggers an initial scan. If you want to disable this feature, you can set the INITIAL_SCAN parameter to 0 at install time, like this:

AIKIDO_TOKEN=REPLACE_ME INITIAL_SCAN=0 dnf install -y https://aikido-vm-agent.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/v1.3.5/aikido-vm-scanner.x86_64.rpm

CLI parameters

If for any reason you need to start the scanning on demand via the command line, you can specify the following CLI parameters to be used for that scan:

  --api-key string
        API key for authentication
  --hostname string
        Hostname of the machine
  --select-catalogers string
        Comma-separated list of catalogers to use or remove
  --vm-type string
        Type of the virtual machine

These CLI parameters take precedence over those specified in config.json.

We trigger an automatic scan once per day and those scans will still use the configuration file and not the CLI parameters, so it is always preferred to place these in config.json.

• Example for setting a custom hostname via CLI:

/opt/aikido-vm-scanner-1.3.5/aikido-vm-scanner --hostname "My Custom VM"

• Example for excluding Golang catalogers via CLI:

/opt/aikido-vm-scanner-1.3.5/aikido-vm-scanner --select-catalogers "-go"

Uninstall

Manual uninstall

For Red Hat-based Systems (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora)

dnf remove -y aikido-vm-scanner

For Debian-based Systems (Debian, Ubuntu)

apt-get remove -y aikido-vm-scanner

Logs

Logs are available here, along with the last generated SBOM: /var/log/aikido-vm-scanner-1.3.5