This project demonstrates the steps necessary to set up a private Cloak team endpoint. It takes the form of a pair of Ansible playbooks that can be thought of as executable documentation. Running these against a clean install of Ubuntu 16.04 will produce a minimal but functional Cloak endpoint to examine. It is expected that administrators will use this project as a guide to implementing their own deployment automation for producing production-ready Cloak endpoints.
Remember that unlike its companions, this repository is just documentation and sample code. If any parts of it are directly applicable to your own situation, don't hesitate to copy them. This project itself makes absolutely no guarantees about the demo servers that it configures and it may make backward-incompatible changes of any kind at any time for any reason.
To start, you'll need to have a team registered at https://www.getcloak.com/, with a private network and a target defined. The Cloak website has more information about this and the rest of this documentation assumes that you're already familiar with the general concepts. Every server is registered to a particular target, so you'll need the target ID to proceed.
You'll also need a clean Ubuntu 16.04 machine ready to go. Any cheap consumer VPS is fine for our purposes. The machine obviously needs to be reachable via the FQDN that you used to register the target. To support ansible, it also needs to have Python installed.
If this machine has an external firewall, you'll need to allow incoming connections on tcp/22 (ssh), udp/443 (openvpn), tcp/443 (openvpn), udp/500 (isakmp) and udp/4500 (ipsec-nat-t). Also protocol 50 (ipsec). To acquire a letsencrypt certificate, we'll need tcp/80. The local iptables will be configured with ansible/roles/network/templates/iptables.rules, so you can refer to that for details. Note that the openvpn ports are technically at the server's discretion, but they're currently always 443.
Finally, you'll need ansible available in your shell. This demo was originally developed with ansible 2.2.1.
Once you have all the pieces in place, the first step is to tell us where your
server is. Create a file named hosts in the ansible directory. This is
an ansible inventory, which in our case can just be a single line that looks
something like this:
cloak.example.com ansible_ssh_user=ubuntu
Of course, you should substitute the FQDN or IP of your server and set any ssh parameters needed to talk to it. If the SSH user is not root, it must have unencumbered sudo access.
Deploying a demo server is a two-step process, starting with registration. This will install the cloak-server command-line interface to our API and register the server with your team. In order to do this, you will be prompted for your Cloak email address and password and the identifier of the target this server belongs to (which you get through your team dashboard).
ansible-playbook ansible/register.yaml
This playbook should only be run once.
One thing the registration step does is create a system user named cloak.
For this demo, this is where we install the CLI and manage all of the
certificates and related info.
At the end of register.yaml, the server should be registered and a
certificate request should be pending. All server certificates need to be
manually approved on the team dashboard.
The second step is to install the VPN services and configure the system.
ansible-playbook ansible/deploy.yaml
This is idempotent and can be run multiple times.
The first thing deploy.yaml does is download the server certificate and
associated information. If you have not yet approved the certificate request, it
will block, so you should go do that now.
The rest of deploy.yaml is a relatively routine matter of installing
packages and rendering configuration files. It also installs some cron jobs to
periodically check for updated certificates and CRLs. The playbooks are well
documented, so you can refer to them directly for the details.
Most Cloak clients operate entirely within your private PKI, but some of them require servers to be authenticated by the public internet PKI (at the time of writing, this just includes Cloak for iOS). By default, we'll obtain a free certificate from letsencrypt so that you can test all of the clients, but you can decline this step if you prefer, or if the server is not currently reachable by the FQDNs that you have provided.
If you initially skip the letsencrypt step and then change your mind later, you
can enable it in /etc/ansible/facts.d/cloak.fact, then run the
letsencrypt.yaml and deploy.yaml playbooks again.