RemoteLauncher

Run RACE Remotely

Slides

RemoteLauncher - one sentence purpose

Start, monitor and terminate remote RACE processes in a secure way from a central location

Dissection:

what is a remote RACE process?
what does it need to start one?
what are the protected resources?

(Excursion) What do we run - RemoteMain processes

RemoteMain driver instantiating RaceActorSystem with config
RaceActorSystem instantiating Master actor
Master actor instantiating configured RaceActors

(Excursion²) Config is Everything

configs are HOCON text files (com.typesafe.config)

configs use a declarative language (graph with RaceActors as nodes and channels as edges)

universe {
  name = "mysimulation"
  ...
  actors = [
    { name = "aircraft"
      class = "gov.nasa.race.actors.SimpleAircraft"
      write-to = "/flightpos"
      heading = 42
      ...
    },
    { name = "probe"
      class = ...
      read-from = "/flightpos"
   ...

(Excursion²) Config Zoom In

(Excursion³) Secret Config Values - Vault

some config values are secret (uid, passwords)
"??" prefixed config values are vault keys

(Excursion⁴) RaceActors Zoom In

RemoteLauncher - the man in the middle

different concerns:

front end: UI, config selection
RemoteLauncher: config files, gateway, remote processes
RemoteMain: actors

RemoteLauncher Zoom In

Physical Protocol: Requirements

need to start remote processes in secure way:
- requires remote launch daemon
- need to transmit encrypted (non-interactive) user authentication
need to exchange encrypted data with launched process:
- control data (RemoteLauncher ↔︎ RemoteMain)
- sim input (private server → RemoteLauncher gateway → remote actors)
- sim log output (remote actors → RemoteLauncher)
minimize number of ports through firewall (admin footprint)

Physical Protocol: SSH

all encrypted, trusted daemon + client, known port
public key authentication (no login shell required)
tunnel control socket (separated from stdio/logging/data streams)
tunnel data server sockets