Restructure

From Project Segfault Wiki
Revision as of 18:07, 8 May 2023 by Midou (talk | contribs) (Since the restructure was done months ago, change all iterances of "will be" to "is" and the future to present.)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

What the hell is this?

In short, we are trying to restructure Soleil Levant to make it more secure and maintainable.

This includes separating things into multiple VMs, and deleting old & unused configs, containers etc.

Overview

There are 5 VMs, CoreVM, DatabaseVM, DockerVM, ContainVM, BackwardsVM.

CoreVM

CoreVM is the VM that hosts our webserver, caddy. It is meant to be an "entrypoint" to the other VMs.

Only ssh for core is forwarded for security, so you need to ssh into it first before SSHing into the others.

All traffic going to all other VMs is going through this.

CoreVM will be the only restructure VM other than BackwardsVM which has access to the LAN network (so that we can do port forward).

It is connected to both the NATs of restructure VMs (vmbr1) and the Pubnix (vmbr2).

It runs on Debian but might be changed to something else if our security needs grows bigger.

DatabaseVM

DatabaseVM (DBVM) is the VM that hosts all the databases for the docker containers.

It is hosting PostgreSQL (preferred) & MariaDB (for services that need it).

The separation of the DBVM is so that we can do more optimizations to the DB and use the hardware to its fullest.

This VM does not have internet access at all other than during updates when the IP Tables rule will be temporarily disabled.

It also runs on Debian and uses the official PostgreSQL & MySQL repositories instead of the Debian one.

DockerVM

DockerVM is the VM that hosts all the docker containers for our services.

It is primarily managed using the Docker CLI with compose but also has Portainer available for quick tasks.

It also runs Debian and is using the official docker repository instead of the Debian one.

ContainVM

ContainVM is the VM that hosts all the LXC containers used for our services.

It does not have a WebUI and will be fully managed from the CLI alone.

This is hosting the Wiki and other services that will come in the near future.

BackwardsVM

BackwardsVM is the VM that hosts all the non-HTTP services.

It is the only other VM which has access to the LAN.

It was formalized later on when we realized that forwarding the ports via something like HAProxy would mean we wouldn't be able to retrieve IPs of connecting entities, which may cause issues for the programs, like in the case of TURN, or make moderation an extreme hassle.

HAProxy does have an option for Transparent Proxying (TPROXY) which remediates this issue, but this is not enabled in Debian's kernel, and we did not want to compile and maintain our own custom kernel for the same.

BackwardsVM is basically a second DockerVM, though it also hosts some things non-docker like our Ejabberd XMPP server and the turnserver used by it and matrix.