Offline Installation

To install MetaDefender Sandbox on an offline system without an Internet connection, it is necessary to prepare the offline installation assets on an online computer or virtual machine running Ubuntu 22.04 or Ubuntu 24.04 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5.

After the preparation step is completed, the offline installation can be performed on multiple offline systems by copying the pre-built assets to the target systems.

Due to legal reasons, the full offline installation package cannot be downloaded directly from my.opswat.com.

Phase 1 - Preparing Assets for Offline Installation (Online System)

An online system running Ubuntu 22.04 or Ubuntu 24.04 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5 is required for Phase 1.

This system can be a physical computer or a (temporary) virtual machine. It can also be decommissioned after the installation assets are prepared and copied.

Step #1 - Download and unpack the release archive

Download the release archive from https://my.opswat.com/portal/products and copy it to the online system.

Note that the release archive is password protected and needs to be unpacked.

Ubuntu 22.04 or Ubuntu 24.04

Install the required dependencies and unpack the release archive as follows:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install p7zip-full multitail libslang2 -y

7za x -aoa -p"PASSWORD" MetaDefender_Sandbox_vx.y.z-Standalone.zip

Red Hat 9.5

Install the required dependencies and unpack the release archive as follows:

sudo dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm -y

sudo dnf update -y

sudo dnf install p7zip -y

7za x -aoa -p"PASSWORD" MetaDefender_Sandbox_vx.y.z-Standalone.zip

Installation

Step #2 - Move to the installation folder and run the install script

Note that this operation can take up to 20-30 minutes (depending on available network bandwidth).

The necessary assets will be collected in the offline-assets subfolder within sandbox-installer .

cd sandbox-installer

sudo ./install.sh --prepare-offline

If your system does not meet the system requirements, you can consider using the --unsafe option to bypass the requirements check. In this case, the installation might fail or it could take more time.

The absolute minimum requirement is having 20 GB free disk space.

sudo ./install.sh --prepare-offline --unsafe

Step #3 - Copy the installation assets to a portable storage device

After a successful run, please copy the entire sandbox-installer folder to an external storage device (e.g. USB stick, portable hard drive) with at least 10 GB free space.

First of all, connect your USB device and check its mount point (by default, Ubuntu mounts removable media at /media/<username>/<name of USB Device> ):

ls -l /media/$USER

​

Example output:

total 4

drwxr-xr-x 8 myuser myuser 4096 Jan  1  1970 MY-FLASH-DRIVE

​

Example mount point:

/media/myuser/MY-FLASH-DRIVE

After that, you can use the following command to copy the entire sandbox-installer folder to the mounted USB drive (optionally, you can create a tarball instead of copying the folder itself):

mkdir /media/myuser/MY-FLASH-DRIVE/sandbox-installer

cp -rpv . /media/myuser/MY-FLASH-DRIVE/sandbox-installer/

You need to carry this storage device to the offline system(s) where you wish to install Sandbox.

Of course, if you have other means to transfer this folder to your offline system, feel free to use that approach!

Optionally, you can call uninstall.sh if you prefer to remove all files that were created during the installation process. This script will purge all existing Docker images, but it will not uninstall Docker or other system packages.

sudo ./uninstall.sh

Phase 2 - Running Offline Installation (Offline System)

Please prepare an offline system running Ubuntu 22.04 or Ubuntu 24.04 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5.

The "minimized" version of Ubuntu Server is NOT suitable for offline installations, since it lacks some essential packages. Please select "Ubuntu Server" when you install the OS:

Step #1 - Copy the sandbox-installer folder to the offline system

Please copy the installation assets that you prepared in Phase 1 to the offline system where MetaDefender Sandbox should be installed.

If you transfer the files using a USB drive, please connect that device to the offline system and determine its mount point following the suggestions in the previous section.

After that, you can copy the sandbox-installer to your home folder like this (feel free to choose any target directory):

cp -rpv /media/myuser/MY-FLASH-DRIVE/sandbox-installer ~

Step #2 - (Optional) Fix permissions on the opswat-sandbox-packages directory

If you are installing Sandbox on a system with CIS Level 1 or Level 2 hardening, it is required to create the opswat-sandbox-packages directory before the installation and set the necessary permissions:

(This step is only needed on hardened systems)

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/opswat-sandbox-packages

sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/opswat-sandbox-packages

Step #3 - Move to the installation folder and run the install script

Note that this operation can take up to 10-15 minutes (depending on the available system resources).

cd sandbox-installer

sudo ./install.sh --offline

Step #4 - Access the Sandbox web server (https://localhost:443) and setup the initial Admin user

Step #5 - Perform Offline Activation

Please follow the Offline Activation instructions on the License Activation page.

Step #6 - Scan your preferred test file to check if the Sandbox system functions properly

Step #7 - (Optional) Troubleshooting if the Sandbox service failed to initialize

Verify the status of the sandbox service and if the running docker container are healthy:

sudo service sandbox status

sudo docker ps

The sblog bash command can be used to check the application logs for different system components.

This command is available to all users (but might require sudo privileges):

# Show logs from the transform component

sblog 

# Show logs from the broker component

sblog -b