Installing OpenVox Server: Before you begin

Before installing OpenVox Server:

  1. Confirm your platform is supported.

    OpenVox Server is a Linux-only service. Packages are available from the OpenVox repositories at apt.voxpupuli.org and yum.voxpupuli.org.

    apt-based systems:

    Distribution Versions
    Debian 13
    Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04, 26.04

    yum/dnf-based systems:

    Distribution Versions Architectures
    EL (RHEL, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, CentOS) 8, 9, 10 x86_64, aarch64
    Amazon Linux 2023 x86_64, aarch64
    Fedora 43, 44 x86_64, aarch64
    SLES 15 x86_64
    SLES 16 x86_64, aarch64
    RHEL FIPS 8, 9 x86_64

    OpenVox Server 9 no longer ships packages for Debian 11 and 12 (they only provide Java 17) or for Amazon Linux 2. For the list the build system works from, see Supported platforms.

  2. Verify your Java version.

    OpenVox Server 9 requires Java 21 or 25; Java 17 is no longer supported. Install a supported JDK from your distribution’s repositories before installing the OpenVox Server package. OpenVox Server does not bundle a JDK.

    The openvox-server 9.x package depends on openvox-agent 9.x, so the package manager installs or upgrades the agent on the server host along with it.

  3. Plan memory allocation.

    OpenVox Server is configured to use 2 GB of RAM by default. Make sure the host has enough available memory. For testing on a VM, you can reduce this to 512 MB after installation — see the tuning guide.

  4. Open the required port.

    OpenVox agents connect to the server on TCP port 8140. Make sure this port is reachable from all managed nodes. If you are using a firewall, open it before starting the service.

  5. Verify DNS.

    Starting in OpenVox 9, agents no longer fall back to the hostname puppet by default, so plan to set the server setting in puppet.conf on each agent explicitly. Forward and reverse DNS should be correct for the server and every node.

  6. Synchronize clocks.

    OpenVox uses SSL certificates with time-based validity. If the clocks on the server and agent nodes differ by more than a few minutes, certificate validation will fail and agents will be unable to connect. Make sure NTP or a similar time synchronization service is running on all nodes before deploying.

  7. Install and validate OpenVox Server before rolling out agents.

    In an agent-server deployment, the server must be running and reachable before agents can check in. See the architecture overview for background on deployment models.

Once you have completed these checks, continue with Install OpenVox Server.

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