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Accessing your student VM

Learning outcomes

By the end of this practical session, you will be able to:

  • access your student VM over SSH and WinSCP
  • verify the required software for the practical exercises is installed
  • verify you have access to exercise materials for this training on your local student VM

Introduction

As part of locally run wis2box training sessions, you can access your personal student VM on the local training network named "WIS2-training".

Your student VM has the following software pre-installed:

Note

If you want to run this training outside of a local training session, you can provide your own instance using any cloud provider, for example:

  • GCP (Google Cloud Platform) VM instance e2-medium
  • AWS (Amazon Web Services)  ec2-instance t3a.medium 
  • Azure (Microsoft) Azure Virtual Machine standard_b2s

Select Ubuntu Server 22.0.4 LTS as OS.

After creating your VM ensure you have installed python, docker and docker compose, as described at wis2box-software-dependencies.

The release archive for wis2box used in this training can be downloaded as follows:

wget https://github.com/wmo-im/wis2box/releases/download/1.0b8/wis2box-setup-1.0b8.zip
unzip wis2box-setup-1.0b8.zip

You can always find the latest 'wis2box-setup' archive at https://github.com/wmo-im/wis2box/releases.

The exercise material used in this training can be downloaded as follows:

wget https://training.wis2box.wis.wmo.int/exercise-materials.zip
unzip exercise-materials.zip

The following additional Python packages are required to run the exercise materials:

pip3 install minio

If you are using the student VM provided during local WIS2 training sessions, the required software will already be installed.

Connect to your student VM on the local training network

Connect your PC on the local Wi-Fi broadcasted in the room during WIS2 training as per the instructions provided by the trainer.

Use an SSH client to connect to your student VM using the following:

  • Host: (provided during in-person training)
  • Port: 22
  • Username: (provided during in-person training)
  • Password: (provided during in-person training)

Tip

Contact a trainer if you are unsure about the hostname/username or have issues connecting.

Once connected, please change your password to ensure others cannot access your VM:

limper@student-vm:~$ passwd
Changing password for testuser.
Current password:
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: password updated successfully

Verify software versions

To be able to run wis2box, the student VM should have Python, Docker and Docker Compose pre-installed.

Check Python version: 

python3 --version
returns: 
Python 3.10.12

Check docker version: 

docker --version
returns: 
Docker version 24.0.6, build ed223bc

Check Docker Compose version: 

docker compose version
returns: 
Docker Compose version v2.21.0

To ensure your user can run Docker commands your user has been added to the docker group.

To test that your user can run docker hello-world, run the following command: 

docker run hello-world

This should pull the hello-world image and run a container that prints a message.

Check that you see the following in the output:

...
Hello from Docker!
This message shows that your installation appears to be working correctly.
...

Inspect the exercise materials

Inspect the contents of your home directory; these are the materials used as part of the training and practical sessions.

ls ~/
returns: 
exercise-materials  wis2box-1.0b8

If you have WinSCP installed on your local PC, you can use it to connect to your student VM and inspect the contents of your home directory and download or upload files between your VM and your local PC.

WinSCP is not required for the training, but it can be useful if you want to edit files on your VM using a text editor on your local PC.

Here is how you can connect to your student VM using WinSCP:

Open WinSCP and click on the "New Site". You can create a new SCP connection to your VM as follows:

winscp-student-vm-scp.png

Click 'Save' and then 'Login' to connect to your VM.

And you should be able to see the following content:

winscp-student-vm-exercise-materials.png

Conclusion

Congratulations!

In this practical session, you learned how to:

  • access your student VM over SSH and WinSCP
  • verify the required software for the practical exercises is installed
  • verify you have access to exercise materials for this training on your local student VM