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Air-Gapped Install

Air-gapped operation is a primary use case, not an afterthought. Once images and weights are staged, a Lifeboat deployment has no outbound dependency.

What must be staged

Section titled “What must be staged”
  1. The container image, mirrored into your internal registry. Any OCI registry works — Harbor, Artifactory, ECR, ACR, GCR, Quay.
  2. Model weights, copied into the models directory or an internal mirror.
  3. The licence file, which arrives by email — see the ordering below.

The order matters for licensing

Section titled “The order matters for licensing”

An offline licence is signed and bound to one cluster ID, and that ID only exists once Lifeboat is running. Getting this wrong produces a file your install will refuse, and it cannot be corrected after issue.

  1. Install with no licence key. The deployment boots into its 24-hour grace period and generates its own cluster ID.
  2. Read that ID from the console’s License page.
  3. Buy, choose Offline, and give that cluster ID.
  4. Upload the signed .lic on the License page, or drop it on the data volume and point LIFEBOAT_LICENSE_FILE at it.

See Offline licensing for the full procedure and what happens if the data volume is lost.

Registering models from local paths

Section titled “Registering models from local paths”

The standard air-gapped workflow. Models → Add Model → Local path, pointing at a directory of weights or a single .gguf file already on the host. Nothing is fetched.

The public model hub is never contacted unless you ask for a hub download, so a deployment that only ever registers local paths makes no outbound request for models at all.

What the deployment contacts, and when

Section titled “What the deployment contacts, and when”
Contacts
Online licence The licence server, periodically.
Unlicensed A daily census, with no licence key.
Offline licence Nothing, ever.

Neither the check-in nor the census ever carries model names, prompts, completions or token counts. Set LIFEBOAT_TELEMETRY=off to stop the census on an unlicensed deployment. See Telemetry.

Consequences to plan for

Section titled “Consequences to plan for”
  • No automatic draft models. Speculative decoding’s draft heads are normally fetched for you; air-gapped, stage them yourself and set the path.
  • No gated-repository downloads. There is nothing to authenticate to.
  • Licence renewal is manual. An offline licence cannot be updated by a check-in, so an entitlement change means a re-issued file.
  • Back up the data volume. Losing it changes the cluster ID, which invalidates the licence binding.

Sources and references

Section titled “Sources and references”