Agent Mobility

The mobility module can enable the deployment of agents within a site or to other sites (possibly in different building, cities, etc.) remotely. The mobility feature allows authorized VOLTTRON platforms to send and deploy agents, allowing for greater management and deployment ease and flexibility.

This feature requires that you have installed the VOLTTRON™ Restricted.

To create the required keys (minimum requirement to run VOLTTRON with Restricted module installed) enter the following commands in a command terminal:

1. Create ssh directory in VOLTTRON_HOME (see PlatformConfiguration for details on configuring the platform):

   mkdir -p ~/.volttron/ssh

2. Generate ssh key and add to id_rsa file:

   ssh-keygen -t rsa -N '' -f ~/.volttron/ssh/id_rsa

3. Create empty file for authorized keys and know hosts:

   touch ~/.volttron/ssh/{authorized_keys,known_hosts}

Then, for each host you wish to authorize, its public key must be added to the authorized_keys file on the host to which it needs to connect. The public key has a .pub extension. The added hosts must have VOLTTRON instances installed, with the Restricted code installed and enabled (the authorized host has created the keys detailed in the steps above):

• Copy host information securely:

  scp otherhost.example.com:~/.volttron/ssh/id_rsa.pub ./otherhost.pub

• Append host key(s) to authorized_keys file in $VOLTTRON_HOME/ssh:

  ```cat otherhost.pub >> ~/.volttron/ssh/authorized_keys````

See the PingPongAgent example for information on how to add this feature to your custom agents.