MDs On The Outside

These are my findings about something that is NOT supported at all.

Goal

Due to various reasons some have the need to have an MD somewhere outside the internal network

Start

Setup your MD as usual on the internal network, and make sure everything is working as expected. After everything is working, go into the web admin for the MD and

• Remove the MAC address
• Modify the IP address to point to the new external IP address

Problems

DNS, DHCP, PXE and TFTPBOOT

A infrastructure to supply the correct information to the PXE booting MD needs to exist outside the internal network. Best bet is to copy the pxelinux.cfg file manually to a server on the outside.

Network

Make sure you disable the LinuxMCE firewall, and make sure you have a route to 192.168.80.0 from your external network pointing to the dcerouter. Make sure, the host name dcerouter gets resolved.

MySQL

The user root only has access to the MySQL databases from the internal network. This need to be changed:

mysql -e "GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'root'@'<ip-address-of-external-md>';"

NFS

As is with MySQL, the NFS server only allows access from the inside. To remedy, the file /etc/exports has to be modified. Either after each reload, by replacing 192.168.80.0/255.255.255.0 with 0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 or by modifying the file /usr/pluto/templates/exports.tmpl

Make sure to do restart the NFS service after modifying the exports file.

service nfs-kernel-server restart

Conclusion

Things work, but there are many pitfalls, and there is a reason WHY you should let LinuxMCE be the center of your network.