infranet/README.md

InfraNet

Distributed & E2EE self-hosting. The goal is to have nodes voluntarily join the mesh and participate in the network providing compute and storage.

Tenets

• End-to-end encrypted

  E2EE is a requirement for privacy.

• Collabrative

  Members of the network are expected to cooperate to the best of their abilities, whether it's technical, financial or resources.

• Distributed, resilient, reliable and dynamic

  Nodes should be able to join and leave without too much disruption. Bootstrapping, joining and autodiscovery should be as easy as possible, allowing for easy scaling across all members of the network.

• Free and open

  All components should be free and open.

• Shared responsibility

  Knowledge of components will be documented and shared and responsibility for the uptime and maintainence should be shared where possible.

Design principles

• Tested

  All components and goals should be testable to ensure changes don't impact existing functionality or reliabilty.

• Monitored

  All components should be monitored and raise appropriate alerts to ensure good health and early detection of potential problems.

• Containerised

  Simple, versioned components that can be resource constrained, when required, would be of great benefit.

• IPv6

  Avoiding issues with IPv4 NAT, etc. would be desirable.

• Multi-architecture

  The underlaying hardware type shouldn't be a constraint, within reason.

Installation

1. Clone the repo.
2. Create two directories; one to hold the Nebula config and certificates and the other for the SeaweedFS config and certificates.
3. Create config.yaml in the Nebula config directory.
   1. Use config-node.yaml as the template for a normal cluster node.
   2. Use config-lighthouse.yaml as the template for a Lighthouse.
4. Update the docker-compose.yaml volume values for the bind mount directories for both the Nebula and SeaweedFS config directories; check and set a value for the /storage bind mount.
   1. Set the LIGHTHOUSE environment variable to true for a Lighthouse.
5. Decrypt and un-tar the contents of the seaweed-conf.enc file into the SeaweedFS config directory.

   openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -iter 30 -d -salt -in seaweed-conf.enc | (cd /path/to/infranet/config/seaweedfs && tar xvz)
   

   Ask a cluster admin or member for the password.
6. Run the container with docker-compose up -d. This will create two files in the Nebula config directory, host.key and host.csr.
7. Send the contents of the host.csr file to a cluster admin to sign.
8. The returned, signed certificate should go alongside the host.csr file and be called, host.crt.
9. Start the container again and it should find the config and certificates and then connect to the existing cluster.
   1. For a Lighthouse: create a pull request to update the static_host_map entry in the repo's node-config.yaml amended with the Lighthouse's Nebula mesh and public IP addresses and encourage node admins to update their nodes' config files from the repo.