MRBS

Launch the image from the Azure Marketplace, then connect over SSH as azureuser:

ssh azureuser@<vm-ip>

Within a few seconds of the instance starting, the first boot service loads the booking schema and generates the per-VM credentials.

Confirm that Apache and MySQL are active and listening. MySQL is bound to loopback only:

sudo systemctl is-active apache2.service mysql.service
sudo ss -ltn | grep -E ':80|:3306'

The MRBS release is the $mrbs_version_number value in the version file. Check it, along with the PHP, MySQL and Apache versions:

grep mrbs_version_number /var/www/html/mrbs/web/version_num.inc php -v | head -1 mysql --version apache2 -v | head -1

The schema is loaded and a single administrator account exists. Its password is stored as a bcrypt hash, so there is no default or shared login.

Read the application database password from the root-only credentials file, then inspect the tables, users and rooms:

DB_PASS=$(sudo grep '^MRBS_DB_PASSWORD=' /stage/scripts/mrbs-credentials.log | cut -d= -f2-) sudo mysql -umrbsuser -p"$DB_PASS" mrbs -e "SELECT COUNT(*) AS mrbs_tables FROM information_schema.tables WHERE table_schema='mrbs'"
sudo mysql -umrbsuser -p"$DB_PASS" mrbs -e "SELECT id,name,level,LEFT(password_hash,7) AS hash FROM mrbs_users"

The per-VM credentials are written to a root-only file. Read it to get MRBS_ADMIN_USER and MRBS_ADMIN_PASSWORD for signing in:

sudo cat /stage/scripts/mrbs-credentials.log

Keep this file secure. After you first sign in, change the administrator password from within MRBS.

Confirm that MRBS is serving locally. Then browse to http://<vm-ip>/admin.php and sign in as admin with the password from Step 5:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'HTTP %{http_code}\n' http://127.0.0.1/

The home page is the booking calendar. Switch between the Day, Week and Month views, pick an area, and see every room side by side with its current bookings. Click an empty slot to make a new booking.

Open the Rooms admin area to create areas (buildings, sites or floors) and the rooms within them. Set each room's capacity and description.

Use the Users area to manage accounts and permission levels.

Select a slot to open the booking form. Set the brief description, full description, start and end times, room and booking type.

Bookings can be confirmed or tentative, repeated on a schedule, and opened for registration.

The image places these components at the following paths:

• MRBS install: /var/www/html/mrbs/
• Document root: /var/www/html/mrbs/web/
• MRBS config: /var/www/html/mrbs/web/config.inc.php
• Database schema file: /var/www/html/mrbs/tables.my.sql
• Apache vhost: /etc/apache2/sites-available/mrbs.conf
• Apache logs: /var/log/apache2/mrbs-{access,error}.log
• MySQL data: /var/lib/mysql/
• Firstboot script: /usr/local/sbin/mrbs-firstboot.sh
• Credentials: /stage/scripts/mrbs-credentials.log (mode 0600 root:root)

• Change the administrator password from within MRBS after your first sign-in, and add your real user accounts under the Users area.
• Enable HTTPS by installing certbot and requesting a certificate: sudo apt-get install -y certbot python3-certbot-apache, then sudo certbot --apache.
• Restrict the network security group so that ports 80 and 443 are open only to your users or load balancer, and port 22 only to your management network.
• Configure email in config.inc.php so that MRBS can send booking confirmations and reminders.
• Point your domain at the instance. Because the image is host-agnostic, no URL rewrite is needed.
• Patch the OS regularly with sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade.

Sign in to the AWS Management Console, open the EC2 service, and select Launch instance. Under Application and OS Images, choose AWS Marketplace AMIs and search for MRBS. Select the SecureAnyCloud listing, choose Select, then choose Continue on the subscription summary.

Pick an instance type of m5.large or larger. Choose your EC2 key pair under Key pair (login).

Under Network settings, select your VPC and subnet. Create or select a security group that opens port 22 from your management network and ports 80 and 443 for the web application. Leave the root volume at the default size or larger. The database and web volumes are attached automatically.

Select Launch instance. First boot initialisation takes a short time after the instance state becomes Running and the status checks pass. During this time, the database is created, the booking schema is loaded and the per-instance administrator is provisioned.

Alternatively, launch the instance from the command line. Replace <ami-id> with the AMI ID shown on the Marketplace listing, and my-key with your EC2 key pair name. Replace <subnet-id> with your subnet ID, and <security-group-id> with a security group that opens ports 22, 80 and 443 as described above:

aws ec2 run-instances \
  --image-id <ami-id> \
  --instance-type m5.large \
  --key-name my-key \
  --subnet-id <subnet-id> \
  --security-group-ids <security-group-id> \
  --associate-public-ip-address \
  --metadata-options "HttpTokens=required" \
  --tag-specifications 'ResourceType=instance,Tags=[{Key=Name,Value=mrbs}]'

Connect over SSH with your EC2 key pair. The login user depends on the operating system variant you launched. On Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, the login user is ubuntu:

ssh -i /path/to/my-key.pem ubuntu@<public-ip>

Within a few seconds of the instance starting, the first boot service loads the booking schema and generates the per-instance credentials.

Confirm that Apache and MySQL are active. Only the web ports and SSH listen publicly, while MySQL stays on loopback:

sudo systemctl is-active apache2.service mysql.service
sudo ss -ltn

The MRBS release is the $mrbs_version_number value in the version file. Check it, along with the PHP, MySQL and Apache versions:

grep mrbs_version_number /var/www/html/mrbs/web/version_num.inc php -r 'echo "PHP ".PHP_VERSION."\n";' mysql --version apache2 -v

The schema is loaded and a single administrator account exists. Its password is stored as a bcrypt hash, so there is no default or shared login.

Read the application database password into a shell variable, which does not print it. Then inspect the table count and the administrator row. The query shows only the hash prefix, not any secret:

DB_PASS=$(sudo grep '^MRBS_DB_PASSWORD=' /stage/scripts/mrbs-credentials.log | cut -d= -f2-) sudo mysql -umrbsuser -p"$DB_PASS" mrbs -e "SELECT COUNT(*) AS mrbs_tables FROM information_schema.tables WHERE table_schema='mrbs'" 2>/dev/null
sudo mysql -umrbsuser -p"$DB_PASS" mrbs -e "SELECT id,name,level,LEFT(password_hash,4) AS hash_prefix FROM mrbs_users" 2>/dev/null

Confirm that MRBS answers on loopback and that the per-instance administrator credentials are present. These commands do not print the password itself:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'MRBS home page: HTTP %{http_code}\n' http://127.0.0.1/
sudo test -s /stage/scripts/mrbs-credentials.log && echo "credentials file present (0600 root only)"
sudo grep -qE '^MRBS_ADMIN_USER=admin$' /stage/scripts/mrbs-credentials.log && echo "administrator user: admin"
sudo grep -qE '^MRBS_ADMIN_PASSWORD=.{8,}$' /stage/scripts/mrbs-credentials.log && echo "administrator password: generated per instance (value hidden)"

The per-instance credentials are written to a root-only file. Read it to get MRBS_ADMIN_USER and MRBS_ADMIN_PASSWORD for your first sign-in:

sudo cat /stage/scripts/mrbs-credentials.log

Keep this file secure. After you sign in, change the administrator password from within MRBS.

Browse to http://<public-ip>/admin.php and sign in as admin with the password from the credentials file.

Sessions are server-side, so no client-side cookie is tied to the instance IP.

The home page is the booking calendar. Switch between the Day, Week and Month views, pick an area, and see every room side by side with its current bookings.

The week view shows all rooms for the whole week at a glance. In any view, click an empty slot to make a new booking.

Open the Rooms admin area to create areas (buildings, sites or floors) and the rooms within them. Set each room's capacity and description.

Rooms can be enabled or disabled, and the list can be exported to CSV, Excel or PDF. Use the Users area to manage accounts and permission levels.

Select a slot to open the booking form. Set the brief description, full description, start and end times, room and booking type.

Bookings can be marked confirmed or tentative, repeated on a schedule, and opened for registration.

The Report area produces a filtered report of bookings across a date range, area, room, type or description. The report is summarised by room, creator or type, and you can export it to CSV, Excel, PDF or iCalendar.

Use it to review room utilisation or to export a schedule.

The image places these components at the following paths:

• MRBS install: /var/www/html/mrbs/
• Document root: /var/www/html/mrbs/web/
• MRBS config: /var/www/html/mrbs/web/config.inc.php
• Database schema file: /var/www/html/mrbs/tables.my.sql
• Apache vhost: /etc/apache2/sites-available/mrbs.conf
• Apache logs: /var/log/apache2/mrbs-{access,error}.log
• MySQL data (dedicated EBS volume): /var/lib/mysql/
• Web application (dedicated EBS volume): /var/www/
• Firstboot script: /usr/local/sbin/mrbs-firstboot.sh
• Credentials: /stage/scripts/mrbs-credentials.log (mode 0600 root:root)

The database and the web application each live on their own dedicated, independently resizable EBS data volume, so neither shares the operating system disk. Both volumes are mounted by filesystem UUID and are captured into the image, so every instance you launch has the same layout.

To grow either volume, modify it in the EC2 console and extend the filesystem. You can also snapshot each volume independently for backup.

• Change the administrator password from within MRBS after your first sign-in, and add your real user accounts under the Users area.
• Enable HTTPS by installing certbot and requesting a certificate for your domain. On Ubuntu, run sudo apt-get install -y certbot python3-certbot-apache, then sudo certbot --apache -d your-domain.example.com.
• Restrict the security group so that ports 80 and 443 are open only to your users or load balancer, and port 22 only to your management network.
• Configure email in config.inc.php so that MRBS can send booking confirmations and reminders.
• Point your domain at the instance. Because the image is host-agnostic, no URL rewrite is needed.
• Patch the OS regularly. On Ubuntu, run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y.