Set up your CanMe environment

Welcome to the CanMe setup guide. It walks you through building a complete CanMe environment from scratch: rolling out your first Core, taking your first steps in Cansole, connecting your first Mesh and Gates, and finally enabling High Availability with additional Cores.

The building blocks

A CanMe environment consists of a few kinds of devices, all managed from one place:

• Core — the heart of your environment. It runs the management console (Cansole), user login, and the services that coordinate your secure network. You start with one Core and can later grow to a cluster of three.
• Mesh — a relay node with a public address. Meshes carry traffic between locations and let clients connect from anywhere.
• Gate — the on-site connector. A Gate sits inside a location's network and makes the devices there reachable through your CanMe network.
• Cannector — the client app your users (and you, as the administrator) install to access the network from computers and phones. Cansole itself lives inside the network, so even admin access goes through the Cannector.

Everything is administered through Cansole, the web console served by your Core, and new devices are brought online through a simple browser-based rollout page — no command line needed.

What High Availability gives you

With High Availability enabled, your platform runs across three Cores that back each other up:

• The secure network keeps working as long as any two Cores are up.
• One Core is active at a time and runs the platform applications; the others stand by with a near-current copy of your data, refreshed every few minutes.
• If the active Core fails, a standby takes over automatically — applications are typically back online within one to two minutes, with no manual intervention.
• Your platform's public names automatically follow the active Core, so nobody has to touch DNS during a failover.
• A new Core joins the cluster with a single token and receives everything it needs securely — no manual copying of files.

Work through the chapters below in order for a new environment — each builds on the previous one.