You should register for BigV if you're a brand new user. This creates both a username and an account.

If you manage accounts for your own customers, you might want to use account create to create another account under the control of the same user.

Here is what the first-time registration will look like:

$ bigv register
What is your account name?  snowbother
What is your username?  john
What is your password?  Shazam
What is the Bytemark cluster location?  https://uk0.bigv.io/
What is your email address?  john@snowbother.co.uk
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Your identification has been saved in /home/mattbee/.bigv/bigv_id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /home/mattbee/.bigv/bigv_id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
ce:57:48:ad:7a:c4:30:a6:f0:80:98:2c:18:a0:6d:99 mattbee@desk4
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ RSA 2048]----+
|+                |
|+= +       .     |
|*.E o   + . .    |
|..   + o = o     |
|      o S = .    |
|       o o .     |
|        + o      |
|         o       |
|                 |
+-----------------+
Your account has been successfully created. You can now create a virtual machine with the /usr/bin/bigv vm new command.

The command will ask a series of questions, and is currently quite picky about getting the right answers. We'll try to explain them all here:

What is your account name?

BigV understands that you might want to run accounts for yourself, or for several different clients. Each account will get one bill for services. The account name is a short, semi-public name like which identifies the virtual machines that you might create. It can't contain spaces, dots or capital letters, and it can't be the same as any other BigV user's. e.g.

• bytemark1
• matthewbloch
• bob123

What is your username?

Your username belongs to you, personally. It has similar restrictions but is not added to the names of your servers, so can be private. If you already have a Bytemark username, use it here.

What is your password?

Your password is a secret associated with your username. Take the usual precautions for setting a password - if you let it get into the wrong hands people will be able to take over any of your accounts, destroy your data and so on.

What is the Bytemark cluster location?

For now this should be https://uk0.bigv.io/ - we only have the one cluster for now.

What is your email address?

This should be your normal email address, which we use for sending bills, password reminders and so on.

The email matthew@bytemark.co.uk has already been taken

The username mbloch has already been taken

Something went wrong; it's our fault, not yours

--username is required