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-1.3.0/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/v1.3.0/aikido-vm-scanner.x86_64.rpm
Hash
aikido-vm-scanner.x86_64.rpm

MD5

723f3d2178b0d5c10349fab5ccce63e5

SHA256

812878f20be699d7be490106939062b3b0ebb2e565f803539b9dfb24a0684c02

aarch64

Hash
aikido-vm-scanner.aarch64.rpm

MD5

087535bc2e28d49148f620c2a397833d

SHA256

85bb707edfda94ab4da5b88cbaed80335048eb0ab39bc71c56ae7cd47c23780d

For Debian-based Systems (Debian, Ubuntu)

x86_64

Hash
aikido-vm-scanner.amd64.deb

MD5

ab1c0c6511850427efd9f6f7ee29362d

SHA256

d989bff96cda47fb354200cf5ca462ef9217e87793908e693e89e6a5f1c939f7

aarch64

Hash
aikido-vm-scanner.arm64.deb

MD5

f4659e28ece718371f6f8590fda5ba7b

SHA256

983ce196c6c41f00c090240ed9ec9da50522ac2ca05fd0da3f0197b635994ac7

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-1.3.0/.token

  • Change the contents of /opt/aikido-vm-scanner-1.3.0/config.json :

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:

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 all releases subdirectories:

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

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

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:

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:

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:

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

  • Example for setting a custom hostname via CLI:

  • Example for excluding Golang catalogers via CLI:

Uninstall

Manual uninstall

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

For Debian-based Systems (Debian, Ubuntu)

Logs

Logs are available here, along with the last generated SBOM: /var/log/aikido-vm-scanner-1.3.0

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