Accessing the virtual machines.

Accessing your virtual machines can have various procedures depending on what you have selected as your external network. Read the correct guide in the section with the same name as your external network.

ntnu-global

If you have global IPv4 addresses on your virtual machine you should be able to communicate with the virtual machine globally. That means that you should be able to contact the virtual machine over SSH (if it is linux) or Remote desktop (if it is windows) from the whole world, as long as the security-groups your machine is a part of are configured correctly.

It is smart to limit who is able to connect to your machines over these protocols, as the internet is regularly scanned to discover hosts communicating with SSH or RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol).

ntnu-internal

Addresses in this network are available troughout NTNU, but not in the rest of the world. That means that if your client are on a NTNU network you can contact it directly similar as if the virtual machine is in the ntnu-global network.

If you want access to your machines from home you would need to connect to the NTNU VPN service first.

ext-net

Trough a jumphost

All floating IP's within skyhigh are accessible to all machines in the cloud (if permitted by the access groups). All users with an active project in skyhigh are able to log in to "skyhigh.hig.no", and trough that machine it is possible access all other machines. This machine also allows ssh-tunnels to tunnel other traffic trough SSH (f.ex RDP, HTTP(S) and similar).
In order to access your own virtual machine through the jumphost via SSH on a Linux machine follow the following steps:

1. Establish a SSH tunnel through the jumphost skyhigh.hig.no by executing the following command on your terminal:
   #ssh [NTNU-username]@skyhigh.hig.no 
   e.g: ssh danil@skyhigh.hig.no
   
   - use your NTNU user name in order to log in
   
   
2. After having logged in into skyhigh.hig.no, start an SSH connection to your virtual machine in openstack by executing the following command:
   
   #ssh -i $HOME/.ssh/ntnu-openstack.pem user@vm-ip-address
   e.g: #ssh -i /home/danil/.ssh/my-private-key.pem ubuntu@172.16.1.140
   
   - use the private-key that you generated/uploaded when creating the virtual machine through the openstack webinterface.

If your virtual machine in openstack hosts a (running) web server and you need to access the website running on that server, follow the following steps: 
Do not forget to enable (inside openstack) ingress traffic to the corresponding ports (e.g. 80, 443) at the corresponding security group. 

1. Establish a SSH tunnel through the jumphost skyhigh.hig.no by executing the following command on your terminal: 
   # ssh -D [local-port][ntnu-username]@skyhigh.hig.no
   # ssh -D 9000 danil@skyhigh.hig.no
   
   - use your NTNU user name in order to log into the jumphost
   - before establishing the SSH connection make sure that the selected port (e.g. 9000) is not currently being used by another process. The availability of a port on a Linux machine can be checked with the following command: #netstat -tulpn . If the port is listed in the output, this means that the port is already being used by a process. In that case you will need to select a different port. 
   
   
2. Enable proxy configuration on your browser. The following steps apply only for Firefox:
   
   1. Go to Firefox Preferences -> Advanced -> Network -> Settings:
      
      
      
      
      
   2. Inside settings, select Manual proxy configurations and enter 127.0.0.1 followed by your chosen port (e.g. 9000). Do not forget to enable SOCKs v5. 
      
   3. Click OK to accept the changes. 
   4. Browse to http://www.minip.no/ (with Firefox) to check whether you are connected to the skyhigh.hig.no network. You should now be able to access  the website running on your web server by browsing through it with Firefox.