VPN

The Software Heritage server and the VMs running on it are severely firewalled. To get onto their network unrestricted, a VPN based on OpenVPN is available.

The setup is client-server, with per-client certificates.

Openvpn client configuration

Sample configuration file, e.g., /etc/openvpn/softwareheritage.conf:

remote louvre.softwareheritage.org
ns-cert-type server 
comp-lzo 
nobind
dev tun
proto udp 
port 1194 
log /var/log/openvpn.log
up-restart 
persist-key 
persist-tun 
client 
ca /etc/openvpn/keys/softwareheritage-ca.crt
cert /etc/openvpn/keys/softwareheritage.crt
key /etc/openvpn/keys/softwareheritage.key
user nobody
group nogroup

# If you are using resolvconf, add this:
# Make sure you add louvre to /etc/hosts to avoid issues in using the vpn-provided DNS server.
script-security 2
up /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf
down /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf

# If you want the connection to persist when your network fails, add this:
ping-restart 10

In addition to the above configuration file, you will need to install the following 3 files under /etc/openvpn/keys:

• softwareheritage-ca.crt: public certificate for the Software Heritage certification authority (CA)
• softwareheritage.crt: public, client-specific certificate (see below)
• softwareheritage.key: private, client-specific key (see below)

Obtaining a client certificate

For users

Ask an admin to produce a pair of client-specific certificate/key for you.

Please ensure there is a way to send you the certificate and the key securely (e.g., GPG).

For admins

On louvre:

root@louvre:~# cd /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/
root@louvre:/etc/openvpn/easy-rsa# . vars 
root@louvre:/etc/openvpn/easy-rsa# ./build-key USERNAME
[ accept defaults, they should be OK ]

At the end of the process certificate and key will be in /etc/openvpn/keys/USERNAME.{crt,key}. Send them to USERNAME (securely).

Add the DNS entry for the new host to hiera and do a puppet run on pergamon.

/etc/hosts entries

Once the Vpn is setup on your machine, you can access Software Heritage hosts via their private IP addresses; see Network configuration.

OpenVPN now pushes the address of our DNS server (192.168.100.29, pergamon).

You might want to add louvre.softwareheritage.org in your /etc/hosts to avoid a bootstrap problem if the "on-vpn" DNS server is in your resolv.conf.