I was in a position of needing to move a company's inventory management from an Excel spreadsheet to....well anything. Everyone points to SnipeIT being the gold standard for inventory management but I had never been in a situation where SnipeIT was being utilized. I usually had to deal with inventory management in ConnectWise or Salesforce, even the dreaded Excel spreadsheet.

I never ended up migrating that company away from their spreadsheet but I still wanted to set up and play with SnipeIT so I figured I would give it a try at home. I've been meaning to have a record of our household possessions in one place for insurance purposes, maybe SnipeIT could do that for me.

Verify System Requirements

SnipeIT does not list any system requirements other than software dependencies. So I am going to plan on 1vCPU to start, 4GB of memory and I'll run Ubuntu 22.04 on my virtual machine. The dependencies they list are:

• PHP
  • JSON
  • OpenSSL
  • PDO
  • Mbstring
  • Tokenizer
  • cURL
  • MySQLi
  • LDAP
  • PHPZIP
  • Fileinfo
  • PHP BCMath
  • PHP XML
  • PHP Sodium
• MariaDB
• Mod Rewrite

Create Virtual Machine

I open Windows Admin Center and connect to HV-03. I navigate to Virtual Machines and create a new virtual machine named SNIPE-01. I set the Secure Boot settings to Microsoft UEFI Certificate Authority and mount my Ubuntu ISO.

Install Operating System

I power on SNIPE-01 and go through the Ubuntu installation wizard. While the installation is progressing I jump back into Windows Admin Center and connect to DC-02. I navigate to DNS and create the A record snipe.domain.local > 10.10.10.XXX. On my domain registrar I create an A record for snipe.domain.com.

Configure Operating System

Configure SSH Key

Steps performed on desktop via Windows Terminal

• ssh-keygen -t ed25519
• Move-Item -Path c:\Users\david\filename* -Destination c:\Users\david\.ssh -Force
• I open Windows Terminal Settings
• I open the JSON file and add the following:

            {
                "colorScheme": "Ubuntu-ColorScheme",
                "commandline": "ssh -i \"~/.ssh/snipe-01\" [email protected]",
                "experimental.retroTerminalEffect": false,
                "font": 
                {
                    "face": "Cascadia Code"
                },
                "guid": "{0caa0dad-35be-5f56-a8ff-XXXXXXXXXXXXX}",
                "hidden": false,
                "name": "SNIPE-01",
                "tabTitle": "SNIPE-01"
            },

• I make sure the GUID is unique and then save the file

Configure SSH

Steps performed on SNIPE-01

• mkdir /home/david/.ssh
• nano /home/david/.ssh/authorized_keys
• I paste in the public key and save
• chmod 600 /home/david/.ssh/authorized_keys
• sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
  • PermitRootLogin no
  • PubkeyAuthentication yes
  • PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes ssh-ed25519
  • PasswordAuthentication no
  • AuthorizedKeysFile /home/david/.ssh/authorized_keys
• I save the file
• sudo sshd -t
• sudo systemctl restart ssh

Configure Firewall

Steps performed on SNIPE-01

• sudo apt install ufw
  • ufw is already the newest version (0.36.1-4build)
• sudo ufw allow 22
• sudo ufw allow 80
• sudo ufw allow 443
• sudo ufw enable
  • Firewall is active and enabled on system startup

Configure Fail2Ban

Steps performed on SNIPE-01

• sudo apt install fail2ban
• sudo nano /etc/fail2ban/jail.local

[DEFAULT]
bantime = 100m
findtime = 10m
maxretry = 5
ignoreip = 10.10.10.XXX

[sshd]
enabled = true
port = ssh
logpath = %(sshd_log)s
backend = %(sshd_backend)s

• sudo systemctl enable fail2ban
• sudo systemctl start fail2ban

Install SnipeIT

Steps performed on SNIPE-01

• mkdir /home/david/snipe-it
• git clone https://github.com/snipe/snipe-it /home/david/snipe-it
• cd /home/david/snipe-it
• cp .env.example .env
• sudo apt install php libapache2-mod-php php-cli php-mbstring php-curl apache2 php-mysqli php-xml php-ldap php-zip php-bcmath php-json openssl php-token-stream php-libsodium mariadb-server mariadb-client
• a2enmod rewrite
• sudo system restart apache2
• mysql -uroot
  • ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'Password';
  • FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
  • EXIT;

That's as far as I have time to go today. Excited to come back and work on this some more!