UDP Socket over cloud provider - sockets

I am using Appache Tomcat to host webpages that can be accessed by authenticated users and a UDP socket has been opened on port 14550 in which devices sends a stream of communication messages. The system is working fine in the local network. I tried to host the this in Openshift and later found that Openshift does not allow external UDP communication. Now I am considering Amazon EC2 instance, new VM in Azure or in GCP. I would like to know that will there be any issue in using the sockets from my application. Thank you in advance.

No, on AWS EC2 everything is allowed, you just need to configure your Security Group to allow specific web traffic, UDP traffic can also be allowed their.
I was also looking for possible workaround for this issue, but it's quite easy irrespective of what platform language you are using to develop socket program on AWS EC2, as am using Node.js nginx in my case, this should work for all supporting platforms.
Configure Security Group
In the AWS console, open the EC2 tab.
Select the relevant region and click on Security Group.
You should have an default security group if you
have launched an Elastic Beanstalk instance in that region for your
app.
click on Actions button at top, and select Edit inbound rules.
here in Type column select All UDP, or you can set some Custom UDP
rule as well to listen at your socket port.
And there just enter port of your UDP server Ex: 2020.
And that's it!
Note: If something is not working, check the "Events" tab in the Beanstalk application / environments and find out what went wrong.

Related

How do I simulate a VPN connection to Google Cloud?

So I have GCP set up and Kubernetes, I have a web app (Apache OFBiz) running on pods in the GKE cluster. We have a domain that points itself to the web app, so essentially it's accessible from anywhere on the internet. Our issue is since this is a school project, we want to limit the access to the web app to the internal network on GCP, we want to simulate a VPN connection. I have a VPN gateway set up, but I have no idea what to do on any random computer to simulate a connection to the internal network on GCP. Do I need something else to make this work? What are the steps on the host to connect to GCP? And finally, how do I go about limiting access to the webapp so only people in the internal network have access to the webapp?
When I want to test a VPN, I simply create a new VPC in my project and I connect both with Cloud VPN. Then, in the new VPC, you can create VM that simulate computer in the other side of the VPN and thus simulate what you want.
To setup a VPN on GCP you can use Cloud VPN using static or dynamic routing, you will need to configure a remote peer from the location you want to access your GCP resources to establish the connection towards the Cloud VPN gateway on GCP end.
This means you may require a router that supports creating VPN tunnels on your on-premises or use a host that acts like a router to establish this connection using a VPN software towards Cloud VPN (like Strongswan, for example).
You can block external access to the resources on your VPC network by using GCP firewall rules and just allow specific ports or source IP ranges as you wish.
Another option, even if it's not a VPN or encrypted traffic, is to only allow ingress traffic from the public IP from where you would like to connect to your internal VPC, but this is less secure and would only work if you have an static public IP on your on-premises.
Since you said this is a school project, I would recommend asking your teacher for more direct advice. That said, you can't "simulate" a VPN but you can set up an IPSec client on your laptop or whatever and actually connect to it. Unfortunately Google doesn't appear to have any documentation on this so I'm guessing they presume you already know IPSec well enough to write a connection config yourself.
Using kubectl port-forward might be an easier solution.

Is possible to secure communication between Google App Engine and Google Compute Engine?

I deployed an app with nodejs on Google App Engine and mongodb on Compute Engine.
Without security rules, GAE can successfully connect to mongodb, but when I set a security rule which allow to access port 27017 of the VM from the App Engine service account I get timeout request so mongodb is not reachable.
As is not possible to set a static ip to GAE, is there another solution to securing mongodb on Compute Engine?
Check the priority of firewall allow rule and deny rule. Lower numbers have higher priorities. Be sure that the allow firewall rule has a higher priority than other rules that might deny traffic.
Yes, at the moment you're not able to set a static external IP on your GAE application.
There's a possible workaround for GAE Flex to solve your issue:
reserve an external static IP
create f1-micro VM instance with reserved external IP address (this likely fits in the Compute Engine free tier)
create a firewall rule to allow connection to MongoDB server from reserved external IP
create a SOCKS proxy by running a ssh client that routes the traffic through created VM similar to this example
configure nodejs application to use SOCKS Proxy
connect to MongoDB server
UPDATE
Also, if you application can run over HTTP proxy you can Squid proxy installed on this VM instead of SOCKS Proxy.

How do I host my script in a Google Cloud server?

So I have created something small which is a image-rehost where I wish to use Python script where I have a URL such as https://i.imgur.com/VBPNX9p.jpg but with my rehost it would be
https://ip:port/abc123def456
so whenever I access that page it would give me the url that I posted here.
However the issue I am having is that I have no clue how to actually host the server that I made by node-js. Right now I just used the external IP with port of 5000. When I tried to send the image through my home ip by using the
https://external_ip:5000/abc123
the server doesn't recognize anything and nothing is being sent to the server which I in that case think I have setup something wrong.
I am using Google cloud server and I would wish to know how I can host my own server in the google cloud?
As you are having trouble adding a firewall rule, I'm going to suggest make sure port 5000 is open and not 8888.
To open the firewall rule for port 5000 in Google Cloud Platform follow these steps.
1) Navigate to VPC Network > Firewall rules > Create firewall rule.
2) In the 'Create a firewall rule' page, select these settings:
Name - choose a name for this firewall rule
Network - select the name of the network your instance belongs to, most probably
'default' unless you've configured a custom network.
Direction of traffic - 'Ingress'.
Action on match - 'Allow'.
Targets - 'All instances in the network'.
Source filter - 'IP ranges'.
Source IP ranges - '0.0.0.0/0'.
Second source filter - 'None'.
Specified protocols and ports - 'tcp:5000' or 'udp:5000' depending on whether the protocol you are using uses tcp or udp.
3) Hit 'Create'.
This will create a rule allowing traffic on port 5000 to all instances in your network from all IP address sources.
My advice would be to see if these settings work, and then once confirming this, lock down the settings by specifying a specific IP address or range of IP addresses in the 'Source IP ranges' text box, and adding a target tag to you instance and specifying 'Specified target tags' so the port is only open to the instance.
If this doesn't work, you may have a firewall rule turned on within the instance, which you would need to configure (or turn it off).
For more detailed information about setting firewall rules please see here.
For running Node.sj on GCE VM I will suggest you use the Bitnami Node.js package on GCP Marketplace which includes the latest version of Node.js, Apache, Python, and Redis. Using a pre-configured Node.js environment gets you up and running quickly because everything works out of the box. Manually configuring an environment can be a difficult and time-consuming hurdle to developing an application.
Also if you wish to do URL redirection you can use URL map feature provided with Google Cloud HTTP load balancer. This feature allows you to direct traffic to different instances based on the incoming URL. For example, you can send requests for http://www.example.com/audio to one backend service, which contains instances configured to deliver audio files, and requests for http://www.example.com/video to another backend service, which contains instances configured to deliver video files. You find steps to configure and more information here.

Can I write an OpenShift Origin app that can ingest UDP traffic on an external port?

How generic of a PaaS is OpenShift Origin? From looking at the architecture overview, it seems very web-centric. Can I use OpenShift Origin to build a private cloud where I can run arbitrary apps, not just web-based apps?
As the title of my post indicates, my pressing question is whether it is possible to create an OpenShift app that can open a socket and ingest UDP traffic -- I don't need (and don't want) an haproxy for this app, and I don't want all the UDP traffic to first go through the node host's proxy.
Essentially, I'd like to know if I can deploy an app to a node, and have that app be able to receive UDP packets from an external-facing port on that node. Is this possible?
The RedHat docs, Configuring the Port Proxy, make me think this isn't possible:
applications listen for connections on the loopback interface. The node runs a proxy that listens on external-facing ports and forwards incoming requests to the appropriate application
I'm hoping there is a way around this restriction. Would a custom cartridge work?
As far as I know thats not possible at this time. However I would suggest asking the developers for Openshift origin on either the mailing lists or you could check on #openshift-dev on freenode.

How to set up http server on iPhone behind firewall

I want to develop an iPhone app with a simple IM feature. I am thinking about setting up an HTTP server on an iPhone. If the iPhone is using wifi and is behind a firewall, how can I make sure that other iPhone clients can connect to it?
It's not the firewall that will disturb the connection as much it is the NAT.
When you are connected through wireless router to connect the internet you are surfing via NAT. it means you dont really have an extenral IP but once you initiate connection the router will map your intenral IP to one of his externatl ports and for certain time window he will pass connections to you if he will get it to the right port.
That being said, there is no actual way of setting a server behind a NAT unless you can configure port forwarding in the router and internal static IP.
Hope i was clear enough, good luck
I do not really think that you need to get an HTPP server up and running on iPhone to make an application that can send and receive messages (IM). The idea of making one iPhone user to directly connect to one another does not seem right to me since the users will need to know IP addresses of one another to do that.
Interconnectivity between different users of the chat can be solved by making your application communicate via a dedicated TCP port. It is generally advisable to choose ports with a number higher than 1024 since those below are generally found on the list of so-called well-known ports and are used for Web (like port 80), FTP (port 21), SSH (22), DNS (53), etc., it will be the responsibility of the user to make sure the port used by your application is open on the firewall. In order to solve this problem you can actually use port 80 for communication if you find that the port you have selected is blocked. You can do this because you know that this port will not be blocked in most cases. Indeed Yahoo Messenger is reported to use this technique when the firewall blocks the port it uses for communication.
The port should be used by your application to connect to the Web-server that will actually store user credentials, perform authentication, message transmission, etc., and the server should reside on capable hardware to be able to support large number of simultaneous connections. I can suggest using either a VPS (like the one provided by Linode) or a cloud (like Amazon EC2, Google Application Engine, Rackspace).