Zabbix monitor devices in private network from outside - zabbix

I have zabbix-server with Public IP on AWS (EC2 Amazon Linux 2).
I would like to use this server to monitor devices (VMs, printers etc.) inside our company private network. I have full access to the network/devices and AWS EC2 instance.
Should I install zabbix-proxy in company network and then set up connection between zabbix-server and endpoint which has static public ip with port-forwarding? Or just port forwarding?

Zabbix proxy is the recommended method. Several benefits over directly monitoring the endpoints:
Reduces the needed connectivity between the sites to a single TCP port.
Reduces the amount of network traffic.
All traffic can be easily encrypted between both sites.
Proxy can operate in either active or passive mode:
Active - proxy connects to the Zabbix server (likely preferred in this case).
Passive - Zabbix server connects to the proxy.

Related

How to port forward/proxy Cloud SQL connection to access from the internet?

Is there a way to proxy/ port forward GCP Cloud SQL so that we can connect to it via the internet?
I don't want to do an SSH port forward via a Virtual Machine. Instead, I'm looking for a way such that we could connect to CloudSQL from a public IP of either a Virtual Machine or a Kubernetes service.
I don't want to connect directly from the public IP of the CloudSQL instance as it requires us to whitelist the user's IP address. We have also tried the Cloud SQL proxy but faced speed and performance issues.
Hence, now I'm looking for a solution to proxy the CloudSQL connection from a VM or Kubernetes service
I have tried using Stunnel to proxy the connection as described in this documentation.
output=/tmp/stunnel.log
CAfile=/tmp/mysql-server-ca.pem
client=yes
pid=/var/run/stunnel.pid
verifyChain=yes
sslVersion=TLSv1.2
[mysqls]
accept=0.0.0.0:3307
connect=private-ip:3306
But, I get an error while connecting to the MySQL server:
ERROR 2013 (HY000): Lost connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication packet', system error: 104
Edit:
Stunnel runs on a Virtual Machine on Google Cloud
Stunnel connects to CloudSQL via Private IP (Both VM and CloudSQL share the same subnet)
MySQL can be connected from the VM using the private IP
Stunnel Logs:
2022.09.22 10:53:17 LOG5[2]: Service [mysqls] accepted connection from 127.0.0.1:37014
2022.09.22 10:53:17 LOG5[2]: s_connect: connected <mysql-private-ip>:3306
2022.09.22 10:53:17 LOG5[2]: Service [mysqls] connected remote server from 10.128.0.53:53302
2022.09.22 10:53:17 LOG3[2]: SSL_connect: ../ssl/record/ssl3_record.c:331: error:1408F10B:SSL routines:ssl3_get_record:wrong version number
2022.09.22 10:53:17 LOG5[2]: Connection reset: 0 byte(s) sent to TLS, 0 byte(s) sent to socket
To access a Cloud SQL from a Compute Engine VM try the following, you can use either the Cloud SQL Auth proxy (with public or private IP), or connect directly using a private IP address
From the client machine or Compute Engine VM instance, use What's my
IP to see the IP address of the client machine.
Copy that IP address. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Cloud
SQL Instances page.
Go to Cloud SQL Instances
To open the Overview page of an instance, click the instance name.
Select Connections from the SQL navigation menu.
In the Authorized networks section, click Add network and enter the
IP address of the machine where the client is installed. Note: The IP
address of the instance and the MySQL client IP address you authorize
must be the same IP version: either IPv4 or IPv6
Click Done. Then click Save at the bottom of the page to save your
changes. Connect to your instance, either with SSL or without SSL.
To access a Cloud SQL instance from an application running in Google Kubernetes Engine, you can use either the Cloud SQL Auth proxy (with public or private IP), or connect directly using a private IP address. To connect to Cloud SQL you must have:
A GKE cluster, with the kubectl command-line tool installed and
configured to communicate with the cluster. For help getting started
with GKE, see the Quickstart.
Check the document for steps on how to configure without SSL
For Public IP-configured instances, a public-facing IPv4 address may
be enabled, allowing users outside the GCP project and VPC network to
connect to the instance.
Check the similar example here.

Handling requests to and from non-default network interface

I am working on a project that requires me to have multiple network interfaces. I followed the documentation and created three interfaces. I also changed the firewall rules. But even after changing the firewall rules, I am not getting a reply for an ICMP request to the second interface's external IP.
As seen in the screenshot I have allowed all protocols from anywhere to any instance in my network enter image description here
If you look at the routing table of your VM instance, you'll see that the default route is configured on the primary network interface eth0:
vm-instance:$ ip route
default via 10.156.0.1 dev eth0
...
Whether an Ephemeral or a Static External IP address is configured, this External IP is unknown to the operating system of the VM instance. The External IP address is mapped to the VM's Internal address transparently by VPC. You can verify this with the command
vm-instance:$ ip -4 address show
You'll see that there are no External IPs bound.
Furthermore, IP packet forwarding is disabled both between the network cards of the VM instance and network interfaces of Google-provided Linux. The commands below can verify that:
CloudShell:$ gcloud compute instances describe vm-instance --zone=your-zone | grep canIpForward
vm-instance:$ sudo sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward
Therefore when a ping packet is received by a secondary interface, it can't reply.
To explore this behavior a bit, you may launch tcpdump on the VM instance so that listen on a secondary interface, for example eth1:
vm-instance:$ sudo apt-get install tcpdump
vm-instance:$ sudo tcpdump -i eth1
then find out External IP of your Cloud Shell appliance and ping the secondary External IP of your VM instance from Cloud Shell:
CloudShell:$ curl ifconfig.me/ip
CloudShell:$ ping [secondary_ip_of_vm_instance]
You'll see in the tcpdump output on the console of your VM instance how ICMP packets are arriving to the eth1 interface from the External IP address of your workstation. But they are not replied.
Google provides explanation of this behavior in the Troubleshooting section of the VPC documentation and suggests possible workarounds:
Virtual Private Cloud > Doc > Creating instances with multiple network interfaces > Troubleshooting > I am not able to connect to secondary interface using external IP:
The DHCP server programs a default route only on the primary network
interface of the VM. If you want to connect to the secondary interface
using an external IP, there are two options. If you only need to
connect outside the network on the secondary network interface, you
can set a default route on that network interface. Otherwise, you can
use Configuring Policy
Routing
to configure a separate routing table using source-based policy
routing in your VM.

Security group for private subnet and public subnet (both EC2)

I have two subnets, public and private. Web server on EC2 is in public subnet and MySQL database on EC2 server in private subnet. We decided not to go with RDS.
For RDS, the inbound rule for private subnet is "MySQL/Aurora". What should it be if MySQL is on an EC2 instance in a private subnet?
I'm trying to make it secure as possible.
You should use two security groups:
Application-SG: Permit inbound access to your app (eg port 80 443). Associate the security group with the app server(s).
Database-SG: Permit inbound access for MySQL on port 3306 with the source set to Application-SG. Associate the security group with the instance running the database.
That is, the Database-SG allows inbound 3306 traffic from the Application-SG. This will permit inbound traffic from any app servers associated with Application-SG.
By the way, you should really consider using RDS, even if only for making backups easier.
It is exactly the same thing. "MySQL/Aurora" is only the label for the port 3306.
You can then use the same security group for an RDS or a self managed MySQL server on an EC2.

Must Zabbix proxy have its own static IP?

I'm currently building a monitoring system with Zabbix. I'm especially trying to set up a Zabbix proxy and
As far as I know, if I set the Zabbix proxy as active, it's then not necessary for the Zabbix server to have a connection with the Zabbix proxy.
Now, what I wonder is if each Zabbix proxy must have its own static IP.
If the proxy is set to active, there is no need for them to have static IP addresses - all that is needed is a TCP connection to the server.

MySQL, Remote connection and security

By default, when you open the bind-address to listen to the outside, the default communication between the MySQL client & server is not secured, that means anyone that can do a MitM attack can view every transactions made.
There is options out there to protect against this type of attack (SSH Tunneling or enabling SSL in MySQL) but from what I understand, Amazon RDS doesn't implement, by default, any SSL security.
So I'm wondering, when you create an RDS instance, is it like installing MySQL on a server and opening the 3306 port or am I missing something?
A few points. Firstly AWS RDS for mysql does support ssl. This is discussed here
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_MySQL.html#MySQL.Concepts.SSLSupport
Second, the usual way to arrange servers in a AWS VPC is to have "private" and "public" subnets. The private subnets route to other private hosts and perhaps to other hosts in the same VPC. But they have no Elastic IPs and no direct access to the Internet Gateway. It is usual to put databases on private subnets so that their ports are not exposed
There is a nice diagram on this page showing this concept
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_Security.html
Lastly, AWS RDS exists within the philosphy of the shared responsiblity model
This tries to make it clear what security AWS services provide and what is supposed to be the responsibility of the customer
If you're creating an instance you've to also allow port 3306 to be open at your endpoints. This means you've to also configure your security settings as to which IP you've to allow for this connection. Regarding SSL security or SSH, as a good practice you should rely on ssh keys with Pass phrase.