inlets-exit-node

Guacamole inlets Exit-Node on Azure

This repo uses terraform to deploy an inlets exit-node on Azure fully unattended. If you are currious about what is an inlets exit-node, then please read the Intro at https://github.com/inlets/inlets.

This is right for you, if you want to publish a webserver, which is inside your internal, corporate network, but you neither have a public static IP addresse, nor want to deal with some kind of DynDNS and port forwardings on your internet router.

An inlets exit-node is a cheap Linux VM in Azure (roughly 8 Euros per month) with a public IP address and a valid full qualified domain name.
Your internal Webserver connects to the inlets exit-node using a SSL secured Websocket connection (this is an outbound connection from the point of view of your internal webserver). If someone enters the full qualified domain name of the inlets exit-node in the address bar of a webbrowser, the exit-node forwards the request to your internal webserver using the Websocket tunnel in reverse.

If your internal webserver is Apache Gacamole, which is a HTML5 based clientless remote desktop gateway, then your are able to connect to any Windows machine on your corporate network using any webbrowser.

Pre-Requesites

Make sure your have Azure CLI installed.
Make sure your have Terraform installed. Those to pre-requesites are already true, if you have already executed install.sh script the initial Step 1.

If you have never logged in with Azure CLI on the commandline, then please run the following command to authenticate your device.

az login

Move to the inlets-exit-node directory. If you have initially used the install.sh, then directory is located at /srv/workfromhome-with-inlets/inlets-exit-node.

cd /srv/workfromhome-with-inlets/inlets-exit-node

Step 1: Create Azure Service Principal Account

To create an Azure Service Principal Account run the following commandline.
Replace your-azure-subscription-id with your real Scription ID. To locate your Subscription ID log in to the Azure Portal and type "Subscriptions" in the top search bar and click on Subscriptions. It should look something like 41dff0cb-6eb4-39a7-b95b-d41c28d92c41. Feel free to also adjust the value of the --name attribute.

az ad sp create-for-rbac \
--name="terraform_inlets_sp" \
--role="Contributor" \
--scope="/subscriptions/your-azure-subscription-id" \
--sdk-auth \
> az_client_credentials.json

Step 2: Configure Terraform environment variables for Azure Resource Manager

Run the arm_env.sh script.
This Script asks you for the VM hostname, the admin username and the admin password.
The information is populated into environment variables and written to a terraform.tfvars file.

Additionally the Azure Service Principal information is read from the az_client_credentials.json, which has been generated in the previous step, and is also populated in a bunch of environment variables and written to the terraform.tfvars file.

Terraform is picking up the terraform.tfvars file automatically in the later steps.

./arm_env.sh

Step 3: Run terraform init

terraform init

Step 4: Run terraform plan

terraform plan

Step 5: Run terraform apply

terraform apply

Step 6: Finished, keep the output

After terraform command has sucessfully finished, you get some green output values. Take a note of them. Maybe would like to store them for later use.