Running Takeoff in Airgapped environments

Josh Cowan

Member of Technical Staff, TitanML

Introduction

By default, Takeoff will reach out to try and validate any changes to your license on each launch. To prevent this behaviour, you can run takeoff in offline mode.

To use offline mode, the server must have previously been booted in online mode, which will download a validated license token to is stored inside the keys folder. Further runs with the OFFLINE_MODE environment variable set (i.e. docker run -e OFFLINE_MODE=true ...) will make no network calls to validate or update the token.

If the server cannot be booted in online mode, a token can be generated on an online machine and then transferred to an offline one.

Transferring license token to offline machines

• Mounting the /code/models/.keys folder from the Takeoff server (e.g. by launching with docker run -v ~/.takeoff_cache/:/code/models/ tytn/takeoff-pro:0.21.2-cpu) allows the token to be retrieved from the local filesystem (in this example, from ~/.takeoff_cache/.keys/). This token can then be transferred to any machine without internet access.
• This token can also be attached to a Kubernetes cluster by mounting the ~/.takeoff_cache/.keys/<my_key> file as a Secret at /code/models/.keys/<my_key> in your deployed Takeoff container.

The token's lifetime is bound by that of the license. Should the license be extended or modified, Takeoff can be run in online mode to obtain a new tokens, and the above process repeated to transfer this to offline machines.