The first run
The first time you open the box's address, the admin pages show a three-step wizard. Do it from a computer on your own network, soon after the install: until it is done, the first person to finish it owns the box.
Step 1: Trust this box
The box serves HTTPS with a certificate it made itself, so your browser has never seen it and will not trust it yet. Everything after this step, the password you are about to set included, should travel over that encrypted connection, so the wizard asks you to install the certificate first.
The quick way is one line in a terminal, shown for the computer you are on:
curl -fsSL http://<address>/setup/trust.sh | sh
irm http://<address>/setup/trust.ps1 | iex
What that line does, and does not do:
- It adds one certificate to the stores your browsers read, for your user only: the login keychain on macOS, the user's Trusted Root store on Windows, the NSS stores Chrome and Firefox use on Linux. It installs no software and never asks for administrator rights. Deleting that one entry undoes it.
- It comes from the box, on your own network, not from the internet. You can open the link in a tab and read it first; it is short.
- It prints the certificate's fingerprint, which you compare with the one on the wizard page.
- macOS asks for your account password once (that is the keychain, not the script); Windows shows its own "install this root certificate?" dialog.
Phones have no terminal: download losos-ca.crt from the same page and add it
as a trusted certificate in the phone's settings. The manual route exists on
computers too.
Then restart the browser and reopen the page at https://<name>.local (or
https://<address>). You can also skip this step and come back to it; the
certificate warning page is for
when it goes wrong.
Step 2: Choose how you sign in
Set the owner password. It needs at least 12 characters with a lower-case
letter, an upper-case letter, a digit and a symbol such as - or !; the
wizard ticks each rule as you type. This one password opens LosOS cloud, LosOS
Git and the admin pages.
The step waits until LosOS cloud has finished its own first start, which takes a few minutes on a fresh box ("waiting for" is shown with the reason). It continues on its own.
When the password is set, the page shows the spare admin key once: 64 characters, with Copy and Print buttons. Print it or write it down and keep it away from the box. It is for the one situation the password cannot cover, LosOS cloud not running, and it cannot be shown again. See Sign-in and the spare key.
On an HTTPS connection the step also offers a passkey, so a phone or a laptop can sign in without typing the password.
Step 3: Sign in
The wizard opens LosOS cloud inside the page so you can sign in with the password you just set, and then takes you to the admin pages' overview. From here on, see The admin pages.