Transcript
Today, we will install Serv-U Gateway to act as a reverse proxy in front of an existing Serv-U server. We're going to follow the same general procedure that anyone deploying a Serv-U gateway in a proof-of-concept would follow. First, we're going to pick an architecture and assign some IP addresses and port numbers based on that architecture. Then, we're going to walk through a few prerequisites, like making sure we have a machine to test on. After that, we're going to perform a live installation and configuration of the gateway, then we're going to test to make sure everything works. So on to step one. We already selected the general architecture we're going to use for today's demonstration. It's a simple one Serv-U, one gateway arrangement. And we'll leave clustering aside, at least until we have the basics down. I'm also going to simplify the services we'll be testing today. Today, we'll be looking at just SFTP and web transfers. Serv-U is already installed on a local machine that has an IP address of 192.168.5.71. Serv-U is currently listing there for SFTP on port 2222 and web transfers on port 8092. The IP address of the Serv-U gateway will be 192.168.5.59. We'll set that up shortly, along with its SFTP and web transfer services on ports 2221 and 8091, respectively. Our installation instructions look for four basic things before you install the software. First, you need an existing Serv-U deployment. I already have that. In fact, there's a gateway here and a few users, which we'll be using for testing. Second, you have to have a configured domain with some users and listeners. And again, that's what we're looking at on the screen now. Confirm on the listeners, for example, that I already have the internal addresses for my core Serv-U server. Third, you need current versions of Serv-U and Serv-U gateway. And just trust me that we're good to go there. And finally, you need a separate machine for Serv-U gateway. And today, we're going to fulfill that requirement with a virtual copy of Windows 2008 R2, running in Oracle VirtualBox. So let's get started with the installation. To install Serv-U gateway, simply start the installation program and select the language that you want to install it in. You can next your way through a few dialogues, accept typical EULA, select an installation directory, and a startup menu. That will kick off the actual installation process, which only takes a few minutes. That will kick off the actual installation process, which only takes a few seconds. At this point, we can execute a few command line commands, basically to verify that the gateway has, in fact, been installed on the server. The first one here is a quick netstat command, which verifies that something is listening on port 1180, both localhost and the specific IP address for gateway. The second command just is a quick listing of all the services and looks for any that have the word gateway in it. So at this point, we're reasonably certain that Serv-U gateway is up and running and listening on the right ports on our virtual machine. That's actually about it for configuration on Serv-U gateway machine itself. The rest of the configuration happens back through Serv-U and its management console. So we're going to flip back there to take a look at that. Gateways are added at the system level. And in fact, there is a gateway system tab within Serv-U. There are no entries there yet, of course. And we're going to add one for our specific gateway that we just added. So the first thing we have to type in is the address that Serv-U will use to connect to the gateway. And that will typically be a private address, the specific address that Serv-U is using to talk to Serv-U gateway. The port number we'll leave at the default of 1180 for now. This is again, of course, the port that Serv-U is going to use to connect to Serv-U gateway. And finally, we're going to type in what's called the public IP address. This is the IP address that the gateway will expose for incoming file transfer connections. So this is the IP address that you would use to connect to with SFTP or web transfer, as we're going to in a few minutes. Normally, in a production environment, this would contain either a public IP address or typically a publicly facing internal IP address. But because again, we're in a proof of concept mode, we're going to reuse the gateway's private IP address here and use that for the demonstration. Description is something that you can put anything you want in. I'm just going to quickly type the operating system of our gateway here. And we want to leave the enable gateway checkbox on. Now when we save it, Serv-U is going to go out to this gateway address, try to connect to this port, and find out the status of the gateway. And in fact, by the time we get back to our list of gateways, Serv-U has already done that and told us that this particular gateway is there and alive and ready to receive listener configurations. It's also telling us that this gateway is running in trial mode. Essentially, when we installed the gateway, you probably noticed that we did not put in any license code. Basically, what happened there is that when we installed it, it immediately started a 30-day trial. And that gives you, even in a production environment, a 30-day window in which to put your production license code. The next thing we need to do, now that we have our gateway configured, it's up and ready, is go back into our domain, open up our listeners, and add the appropriate listeners for the gateway. But before I do that, I want to show you a step that I highly recommend when you are developing this on your own, which is basically to connect to each one of the listeners that are already pleasant within your domain just to make sure that there's no user conflicts, there's no any sort of permission conflicts. In this case, we connected to this port 2222 using SFTP 192.168.5.71. I also preconfigured this through the gateway to 5.59 on port 2221. If I try to connect to this now, you'll see the connection attempt has failed here. And basically, what we need to do to get that to work, of course, is to add listeners and assign those listeners to the gateway. So back to the Domain Listeners tab. Protocol, we're going to start with SFTP. To select the gateway, we're going to use the gateway's IP address. Notice that this was automatically added to the list of possible IP addresses in my listener configuration. And then we're going to type in our port 2221 for gateway SFTP and save it. And we repeat the process for our web transfer listener. Again, we're going to type in 8091 for this listener. The configuration changes we made should take effect immediately. So now if I go back to my FTP client and connect to 5.9 over 2221, I get immediately in. And we can also test our web services. Here's a connection to 5.71. Again, that's my core Serv-U server. I'm going to quickly sign on here. I'll show you what I would see signing on to the core Serv-U server. Again, six folders in here. Close that connection. Now I'm going to do the same thing, a web transfer session to 5.59. Logged in and I see the same six folders. Exactly what you would expect now that the gateway is up, listening, and ready to go.
