What is the best way to access apps locally on a linode?
I installed grafana and few monitoring tools locally on a linode. For security reasons, we have disabled remote access to this server (hence why I went with the local installation instead of cloud connection).
At first, I did some port forwarding and started visiting localhost:<port-number> on my local machine, but realized this may not be the safest way to do this.</port-number>
Theoretically speaking, what is the best and most secure way to be able to run apps locally and access them from a remote machine?
I tried VPCs, but apparently the linode needs to be in a region that is supported by the VPC.
Thank you.
1 Reply
jhartman
Linode Staff
✓ Best Answer
Since you require inter-regional connectivity which is currently not supported by our VPC service, you may want to consider creating a "jumpbox".
Essentially, through the use of aggressive Firewalling and SSH Key-Pair Authentication, you would block access to your services from anyone other than your specific jumpbox IP. This would allow you to safely connect to your Jumpbox then securely connect to your "backend" nodes. Please keep in mind that this would still require your VPC Nodes to have public IP addresses except in instances where your Jumpbox is in the same data center and has been deployed in the same VPC subnet.
Exposing services/applications through a Reverse Proxy may also be helpful. This would allow you to access backend resources/applications by only exposing the frontend to requests:
Cloud Firewall may be best suited for this goal since it would prevent non-specified IPs from even being able to access your Linode and wouldn't require your Linodes compute resources to function (unlike an internal firewall like UFW). Otherwise, exposing your applications to the internet always comes with risks, but may be more convenient than creating isolated networks for your applications.