Thanks for the pep talk, Michael. :-) 

I was heavily involved in networking and all that stuff back in the 80’s and so I can say that I do understand it … or at least did at one point. But for the past 20 years I’ve worked in environments where there was an IT Dept that was always there handling things — even simple things. So I’ve lost touch with all of the different layers and levels of indirection that are involved today.

I built this service following a guide laid out by a guy who I assume knows what he’s talking about, but he says it just connects to either localhost or a local IP (192.168.x.y). I’ve gotten lost in situations when people show examples or create tutorials that are really only designed to run within a local environment, and when you ask about “opening them up”, you’re told, “Oh, that’s outside the scope of this material”. This guy offered to let me hire him for his “typical hourly rate” to help get the service I built — following his detailed instructions — working on a remote host. He said, “there are just too many variables involved”. In my mind, it’s a vanilla Windows Server 2016 running on a VPN hosting a service built according to his plans. How many variables can there be? 

-David Schwartz




On Jun 13, 2023, at 5:32 PM, Michael Butash via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

As a "network guy", i.e. someone operating at layer 1-4 mostly, I would say you need to understand networking first.  So few developers and system folk do, and thus struggle in today's day and age around basic networking functions in a cloud world.  It's some basic tradition of "when a packet in a pocket hits a socket" like a childhood rhyme that goes unheard, and really should if you call yourself a self-respecting developer today or the past 20 years.

Understanding basic Layer 1-7 of the network OSI model is the key.

Docker relies heavily on NAT and IP routing between systems.  Even installing a typical web/app/db stack requires local socket interaction between devices using the same networking - perhaps start with this first and understand local socket connections to 127.0.0.1 first.  Then move into docker and IProute2 namespace separation with Docker and like technologies.  If you understand how a firewall works, this isn't that much more complex.

Keeping a consistent control plane between applications (again web/app/db) and basic ip reachability isn't too hard when you understand vlans and networking, maybe extending into overlay tech like Zerotier and Tailscale for apps to talk to each other, securely, and across clouds/networks/domains in general.

I could give a whole "In the beginning.." speech, but best you simply learn some networking first.

-mb


On Tue, Jun 13, 2023 at 3:19 PM David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
Right now I just want to be able to run my web app on my phone and have it access my back-end service remotely.

I’m just having a challenge getting that "signal chain” set up and working. I know what it’s supposed to be in theory; it’s just not as easy as plugging a wire between a couple of sockets.

Docker is optional. 

How can I do something like a "signal trace” in Windows?

-David Schwartz




On Jun 13, 2023, at 2:19 PM, Michael Butash via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

Docker should be an inside to outside port mapping for your application.  The outside port maps needs to reflect your firewall, load balancer, or whatever forwards traffic to it as the destination.

[internet]-[firewall]-[host]-[docker] - you want to thread the needle of ports.  This to That.

If you don't want public facing ports for security reasons, vpn like openvpn or an overlay like zerotier/tailscale is recommended.

-mb



On Tue, Jun 13, 2023 at 2:03 PM David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
I’m looking for someone familiar with Docker who can help me out a little bit.

I’m working on an app with a REST-based web service that I’ve been building inside of a VM (VirtualBox) running Win 10. I’m having trouble getting the service part working on a remote server, and someone suggested using Docker to isolate it and get it running inside of the VM first, then copy it to the remote server. The remote server is also Windows based, obviously.

I’m having trouble getting all of the IPs and ports and holes in the firewall aligned so I can reach it from outside the server.

Right now I probably don’t _need_ Docker, although it could be helpful at some point when I’ll need to scale-up, so I’m not even really committed to using it other than it might be easier to set it up inside of the VM and make everything work there first.

(As much as I’d like to build the service to run on Linux, one of the libraries I’m using is not set up for Linux yet, so it’s not an option at this time. The vendor says they might support Linux at some point in the future.)

Anyway, I’m just looking to see if anybody might be able to help me get my service code running on a remote Windows server that’s accessible from elsewhere. (The code itself runs on the server, I just can’t reach it from the outside, which is the whole point of having it there.)


-David Schwartz




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