1. Installation

1.1. Hardware requirements

Border is packaged for a set of supported operating system platforms (see Supported platforms). Any machine (real or virtual) with one of these platforms can be used to run Border.

For many installations, servers that have been pensioned off from active duty can perform admirably as Border servers. For serving a small LAN, even low-performance machines may be sufficient. If the server's operational duties are larger, then a suitably performant machine can be selected.

We aren't able to recommend specifications in this document as it would be outdated quickly. It is best to profile the usage patterns and prepare a hardware configuration accordingly.

Error

TODO: Add a link to Border support for help with hardware configuration.

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TODO: Add a link to a tuning section.

1.2. Supported platforms

Border is written to run on POSIX operating systems. The following platforms are supported by this release of Border:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (x86_64)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (aarch64)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (x86_64)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (aarch64)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (x86_64)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (aarch64)

  • Fedora 41 (x86_64)

  • Fedora 41 (aarch64)

  • Fedora 42 (x86_64)

  • Fedora 42 (aarch64)

Users of AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux distributions may use the packages for the corresponding Red Hat Enterprise Linux version. Packages for current versions of FreeBSD, Debian, and Ubuntu will be added in the future.

Installation instructions for each supported platform will be available soon. For now, if you know how to install RPMs using dnf, please adapt the following instructions for your platform.

To install Border on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (x86_64), you may run the following commands as the root user.

First, install the akira-release RPM package that will add the akira-epel and akira-epel-testing DNF repositories to your system, as well as associated GPG keys used to verify signed RPM packages from these repositories:</p>

# dnf install https://download.banu.com/packages/akira/1.99/epel/testing/10/x86_64/akira-release-1.99.8.20251104005426.4e37e60402-1.el10.noarch.rpm

Then, enable the akira-epel-testing DNF repository:

# dnf config-manager setopt akira-epel-testing.enabled=1

Then, install the border RPM package that will install the Border software and documentation:

# dnf install border

Then, if you wish to run Border, configure border suitably by editing /etc/border/border.conf, and then run it:

# systemctl enable --now border

Note

For information about Border's version numbering, see Border version numbering scheme. For information about Border's branches and EOL dates, see Border branches.

1.3. Upgrading

Please read the release notes before upgrading to a newer version of Border (see the chapter titled Release notes).