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Quickstart

This walks through the first thing worth doing: finding out what is wrong, and fixing one of it.

1. Run an assessment

Open Security and select Run assessment. It takes a few seconds.

You will get a score out of 100 and a list of controls, each in one of five states:

State Meaning
Passed The appliance checked it and it is as it should be.
Failed It checked it and it is not.
Warning Not wrong, but worth looking at.
Not applicable The control does not apply here — a TLS control on a server offering no TLS.
Error It could not check. Never treated as passed.

A fresh appliance will have failures. That is normal: Ubuntu's defaults are general-purpose, and several controls describe a hardened posture rather than a broken one.

2. Read a finding

Select any failing control. Every finding tells you:

  • What was observed, and where it was read from — a file path, a /proc entry, the output of a configuration tool
  • What was expected, and why it matters
  • What to do about it

If a finding does not tell you what was observed, that is a bug — please report it.

3. Preview a fix

Failing controls that the appliance can fix show Remediate. Selecting it shows you a plan before anything changes:

  • The exact file that will change, and a diff of the change
  • What the change does, in plain language
  • Whether it risks your connectivity
  • Whether a service will be reloaded

Read the diff. Approving a change you have not looked at is the one habit this design cannot protect you from.

4. Apply it

Select Apply. The appliance then, in order: takes a backup, validates the proposed configuration, writes it, validates what is now on disk, reloads the service, checks it came back, and re-runs the control.

If any step fails, it puts the file back and tells you why. A change that cannot be completed does not leave the appliance half-changed.

5. Confirm

Re-run the assessment. The control you fixed should now pass, and the score should move.

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