Preparing your Anka Nodes

Once the Anka Build Virtualization software has been installed onto a macOS machine, you'll typically want to ensure that the machine has high availability. This requires turning off sleep and several other default features that would cause the machine to become unavailable. Below are the preparatory steps we suggest:

1. Start a UI session by logging into your node's user to ensure Apple's services are started (it doesn't have to be an administrator).

2. Enable automatic login for the current user: Go to Preferences > Users > enable automatic login. Or, using the CLI.

   If using the CLI method, you must also XOR-encrypt the login password and add it to /etc/kcpassword. The /etc/kcpassword file must be owned by root:wheel with a mode of 0600. See the GitHub repository veertuinc/kcpassword for help generating the encrypted password string.

3. Uncheck Log out after X minutes of inactivity under System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Advanced

4. Uncheck Require password X after sleep or screen saver begins under System Preferences > Security

   VNC may be required to disable this. It's possible your hardware does not have VNC enabled and you also don't have physical access. The following are the commands necessary to enable VNC from an SSH:

   The following examples are only for OS X 10.5 and later.
   cd /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/
   sudo ./kickstart -configure -allowAccessFor -specifiedUsers
   sudo ./kickstart -configure -allowAccessFor -allUsers -privs -all
   sudo ./kickstart -activate
   

5. Disable all forms of sleep: Go to Preferences > Energy Saver > disable any sleep options.

   Alternatively, you can do this from the command-line:

   # Never go into computer sleep mode
   sudo systemsetup -setcomputersleep Off
   systemsetup -setcomputersleep Off || true
   # Disable standby
   sudo pmset -a standby 0
   # Disable disk sleep
   sudo pmset -a disksleep 0
   # Hibernate mode is a problem on some mac minis; best to just disable
   sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
   

6. Disable spotlight:

   If you cannot perform launchctl commands, you can execute these commands from the command-line:

   # Disable indexing volumes
   sudo defaults write ~/.Spotlight-V100/VolumeConfiguration.plist Exclusions -array "/Volumes"
   sudo defaults write ~/.Spotlight-V100/VolumeConfiguration.plist Exclusions -array "/Network"
   sudo killall mds
   sleep 60
   # Make sure indexing is DISABLED for the main volume
   sudo mdutil -a -i off /
   sudo mdutil -a -i off
   

   MDS can be disable with sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist, but only if SIP is disabled on the host (not recommended)

7. Big Sur Only (optional): Disable Apple's mitigations with sudo anka config vmx_mitigations 0. Without it, performance will be ~10% worse inside of the VM.

8. Set the same chunk_size across your nodes with anka config chunk_size 2147483648 (2GB). Any of the machines that create VM templates/tags need to also have this set.

   If the chunk_size is too small, you may hit Too many open files when trying to start VMs. You can try to modify the system's maxfiles (sudo launchctl limit maxfiles 4096 unlimited), but it may also be a good idea to increase the chunk_size to a larger size as well.

9. Reboot the host

You may also want to have your nodes restart on host level failure: systemsetup -setrestartpowerfailure on & systemsetup -setrestartfreeze on

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