A design goal of the cloud unit is for the students to learn that communication over the public internet may not happen unencrypted.

This is why the fake cloud environment also uses encrypted HTTPS.

In order to enable HTTPS we need certificates signed by a certificate authority trusted by all the participants in the network. Acquiring certificates signed by a real CA would complicate the lab setup so a fake CA is created during the disk image build process.

This is all done by the Makefile in disk_images/certificates/ that sets up the CA, creates a key for the cloud server to use and creates a signed certificate for that key.

If you decide to run the server with a custom domain name you should add that domain name to the disk_images/certificates/nota-cloud.conf file.

• The certificates appear invalid:
  • Check that the system time is correct and that the devices can reach an NTP server.
  • Make sure the virtual machine and Raspberry Pi images ware built on the same host and in one go.