Connecting to a digital ocean Private Network

August 9, 2016 4.2k views
Networking Ubuntu 16.04
yoseph
By:
yoseph

Hello

I am building out an infrastructure for an application that my team is building. I currently have 4 droplets (may end up being 5 droplets) each running Ubuntu 16.04. I have one droplet acting as a reverse proxy server (running NGINX), one droplet acting as my Application server, one application acting as my Database Server and one droplet is a Continuous Integration server (running jenkins). I want to make sure that all but the reverse proxy server are only accessible over the Private network that you guys provide. How ever, I obviously still want to be able to access these droplets even though they are only accessible on private Networking. How could I do this? Do I need to setup openVPN and have that connect to the your Private Networking or what?

Thanks for your help!

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1 Answer
ryanpq MOD August 9, 2016
Accepted Answer

You’ve got a few different options here. In all cases, this guide should help you get a firewall set up on your droplets.

You could decide to keep SSH on the other droplets accessible on the public network (on a non-standard port) or you could SSH to the server hosting your reverse proxy and then ssh from there to your other droplets. A VPN would be another option. Additionally you can access your droplets via the console in the control panel though you will need to set up a password for your user to do so.

How To Setup a Firewall with UFW on an Ubuntu and Debian Cloud Server
by Shaun Lewis
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  • yoseph August 9, 2016

    How would I set up the VPN? I would rather restrict all SSH activities to only being allowed on the private network. And I would rather use my own terminal rather than the online control panel one.

    • ryanpq MOD August 9, 2016

      Absolutely. That makes sense. This guide will walk you through setting up a VPN on a droplet. You can then configure the firewall on all the droplets except the nginx reverse_proxy to only accept connections coming from the VPN server’s IP address.

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