Getting Started

Setting up your Subscription (required, but not while in alpha/beta)

Setting up the Certificate Authority

In your browser login to your http://catalystvpn.io account and select + Add Certificate Authority

Your CA will require a name and a private CIDR network, the name can be anything but the network should/(must?) be private. We recommend sticking to networks in these subnets: 10.x.x.x/8, 172.16.x.x/16, 192.168.x.x/24.

If you need a calculator to help you figure out the number of hosts you can have in each network I recommend using this site: https://mxtoolbox.com/subnetcalculator.aspx

Setting up the Lighthouse (required)

Once your CA is created it's now time to setup your Lighthouse - this is the piece that will keep every endpoint up to date as to the location of every other endpoint via their public IP. Within the dashboard click, + Add Lighthouse Fill out the form - Name: this can be anything Public IP: this has to be a publicly routable IP with UDP Port 4242 available to it DNS Name: this needs to be a FQDN that is pointed to your public IP Click Submit

Once you've submitted the form, you'll be redirected to the details of your newly created lighthouse. The link to setup your lighthouse is found via the "Install Script" hyper link. Download the script and copy it to your lighthouse, chmod +x the script on the host and run it as sudo/root.

Note, each link/install script is only valid for 10 minutes, so you should setup your lighthouse quickly otherwise you'll need to manually refresh your lighthouse endpoint. To create a new install link, go to the detail view of your Lighthouse and click Edit. Change the option 'Create new install script link' to yes and submit.

Setting up endpoints (not required, but kind of pointless if you don't set up endpoints.)

  1. Gathering the required info:

  2. Create an API Key

    1. Within your dashboard, select your Email -> My Profile -> Select New API Key
    2. A new API key will be displayed at the bottom of your screen, save it in a safe place as you'll only be able to see it once.

  3. Team Name

    1. Your team name is the name directly after the /a in the URL.
    2. You can also get your team name by clicking My Team -> select My Team you'll see Your Network Name this is your team name.

  4. Utilzing the installers from the left menu, download the appropriate installer for your OS (macOS net ready yet) and transfer it to your host.

  5. On your Windows host device in Powershell or CMD prompt,

  6. run the installer as ./install_catalyst.exe teamName apiKey

  7. On your Linux host device in terminal,

  8. run the installer as sudo ./install_catalyst_linux_amd64 teamName apiKey

  9. On your Mac host device in terminal,

  10. run the installer as .\install-catalyst teamName apiKey

    1. I'll fix the name of the Mac installer in the future, in the end there will be a desktop app to manage this and remove the need for a running commands via a terminal.

  11. If all error checking goes as intended you should be able to ping your lighthouse IP or any other endpoint with a Catalyst VPN IP.