Connecting to BACNET Server on Host Machine Using Client Container - docker

I am trying to connect my BACNET client which has been containerized and the BACNET server which is running on the host machine. I am using Docker for Windows on Windows 10 (host machine) with Linux containers.
I have tried the following:
a. Publishing the ports 47808 for the client container with the run command.
b. Running the container with network=host, to access services of localhost.
c. Tried specifying the gateway IP as the server's IP address with run command.
d. Running the container in the same subnet as my server
e. Running the container with the host IP specified and the ports published.
My bacnet server, taken from https://sourceforge.net/projects/bacnet/ always connects to the DockerNAT, 10.0.75.1? Any idea why does this happens? The server application is not a container but an executable file.
Server IP:10.0.75.1 (dockerNAT)
Client container running on host machine.

From a quick google:
For Windows containers this component is not used and containers and
their ports are only accessible via the NATed IP address.
With respect to BACnet, this is going to put you in a world of hurt. You will have to use BACnet BBMD with NAT support in your container to achieve this, and your BACnet Client will have to register as a BACnet Foreign Device. The BACnet Stack at SourceForge does seem to have some NAT support (the code seems to be there but I have never tested it in its original form).
So what you are seeing is 'expected', but your solution is going to require that you become much more familiar with BACnet BBMDs than you ever want to be. Read the BACnet specification carefully. Good luck.

Related

Freezing my machines IP only for the containers and internal communications

We have a system of numerous microservices, which when setup in local, refers to certain services in my local using their IP(of course resolved via Consul).
It becomes a problem when I connect my laptop from different networks, when the IP of my machine changes. Is there a way in which I can freeze the IP of my machine only for the communications from the containers and the services within my machine?
PS:
Of course, loop-back address won't work, as the loop-back address from container will refer to the container itself and not the host machine.
I can't run with network=host, as there will be many services in different containers running in same port.
I'm using Mac, but looking for generic solution, which would also work in Ubuntu.
Your containers shouldn't ever need to know the ip address of your host. For Docker on MacOS, you can use the hostname host.docker.internal to refer to the host, and this will work regardless of how your host's primary address changes.
While in the past this wasn't possible on Linux, you can now set up the equivalent alias by mapping that hostname to the magic address host-gateway:
docker run --add-host host.docker.internal:host-gateway ...
That will give you consistent behavior for your configurations under both Mac and Linux.

Can't connect to docker container running minecraft server online

So I've been trying to host my own Minecraft server for a while now and I hit a snag.
I have proxmox (192.168.2.100) running an ubuntnu server VM (192.168.2.101) which has a docker container running my Minecraft server. I can connect to the server locally just fine using the ubuntu's IP address and minecraft port, but when I try to port forward the server, I can't connect to it. I checked to see if my port was exposed or not and it is so I know it's not that.
This is the container that I'm using
Okay, so after a long time looking at configurations and some help from the proxmox forum, it turns out that my modem doesn't support NAT reflection which means that any attempts to access my server though my public IP on the same network wouldn't work at all. I used my phone's mobile network to test if I could access the server from outside my local network and it worked just fine!

How to make MQTT broker docker image accessible to devices in LAN?

I have a a docker container with a few images running there. I run them via docker-compose up command. On my device everything works well with localhost but I want to make so that other devices in the same network will be able to access the MQTT broker as well. How do I do that?
Currently, in my code I do this:
ws:localhost:9001
But since this localhost applies only for the device that runs docker, another laptop won't be able to use it. How do I solve that?
You use the LAN IP address of your machine (the one hosting the docker containers) in place of localhost.
We have no way of knowing what that address may be, but it could start with 192.168.x.x or may be 10.x.x.x
By default, Docker has a "bridge" network that will bridge your container to the outside world. Just use the IP address of the computer where your MQTT Broker Container is running, and port 9001, and it should work fine.
If you need to run it on an internal Docker network, you will have to use something like an ADC or TCP Proxy of some sort to allow access to it.

Docker app not available with host IP when using automatic port mapping

I am deploying a eureka server on a VM(say host external IP is a.b.c.d) as a docker image. Trying this in 2 ways.
1.I am running the docker image without explicit port mapping : docker run -p 8671 test/eureka-server
Then running docker ps command shows the port mapping as : 0.0.0.0:32769->8761/tcp
Try accessing the eureka server from outside of the VM with http://a.b.c.d:32769 , its not available.
2.I am running the docker image with explicit port mapping : docker run -p 8761:8761 test/eureka-server
Then running docker ps command shows the port mapping as : 0.0.0.0:8761->8761/tcp
Try accessing the eureka server from outside of the VM with http://a.b.c.d:8761 , its available.
Why in the first case the eureka server is not available from out side the host machine even if there is a random port(32769) assigned by docker.
Is it necessary to have explicit port mapping to have docker app available from external network ?
Since you're looking for access from the outside world to the host via the mapped port you'll need to ensure that the source traffic is allowed to reach that port on the host and given protocol. I'm not a network security specialist, but I'd suggest that opening up an entire range of ports simply because you don't know which port docker will pick would be a bad idea. If you can, I'd say pick a port and explicitly map it and ensure the firewall allows access to that port from the appropriate source address(es) e.g. ALLOW TCP/8671 in from 10.0.1.2/32 as an example - obviously your specific address range will vary on your network configuration. Docker compose may help you keep this consistent (as will other orchestration technologies like Kubernetes). In addition if you use cloud hosting services like AWS you may be able to leverage VPC security groups to help you whitelist source traffic to the port without knowing all possible source IP addresses ahead of time.
You either have the firewall blocking this port, or from wherever you are making the requests, for certain ports your outgoing traffic is disabled, so your requests never leave your machine.
Some companies do this. They leave port 80, 443, and couple of more for their intranet, and disable all other destination ports.

Make docker machine available under host name in Windows

I'm trying to make a docker machine available to my Windows by a host name. After creating it like
docker-machine create -d virtualbox mymachine
and setting up a docker container that exposes the port 80, how can I give that docker machine a host name such that I can enter "http://mymachine/" into my browser to load the website? When I change "mymachine" to the actual IP address then it works.
There is an answer to this question but I would like to achieve it without an entry in the hosts file. Is that possible?
You might want to refer to docker documentaion:
https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/networking/#exposing-and-publishing-ports
You expose ports using the EXPOSE keyword in the Dockerfile or the
--expose flag to docker run. Exposing ports is a way of documenting which ports are used, but does not actually map or open any ports.
Exposing ports is optional.
You publish ports using the --publish or --publish-all flag to docker
run. This tells Docker which ports to open on the container’s network
interface. When a port is published, it is mapped to an available
high-order port (higher than 30000) on the host machine, unless you
specify the port to map to on the host machine at runtime. You cannot
specify the port to map to on the host machine when you build the
image (in the Dockerfile), because there is no way to guarantee that
the port will be available on the host machine where you run the
image.
I also suggest reviewing the -P flag as it differs from the -p one.
Also i suggest you try "Kitematic" for Windows or Mac, https://kitematic.com/ . It's much simpler (but dont forget to commit after any changes!)
Now concerning the network in your company, it has nothing to do with docker, as long as you're using docker locally on your computer it wont matter what configuration your company set. Even you dont have to change any VM network config in order to expose things to your local host, all comes by default if you're using Vbox ( adapter 1 ==> NAT & adapter 2 ==> host only )
hope this is what you're looking for
If the goal is to keep it as simple as possible for multiple developers, localhost will be your best bet. As long as the ports you're exposing and publishing are available on host, you can just use http://localhost in the browser. If it's a port other than 80/443, just append it like http://localhost:8080.
If you really don't want to go the /etc/hosts or localhost route, you could also purchase a domain and have it route to 127.0.0.1. This article lays out the details a little bit more.
Example:
dave-mbp:~ dave$ traceroute yoogle.com
traceroute to yoogle.com (127.0.0.1), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 localhost (127.0.0.1) 0.742 ms 0.056 ms 0.046 ms
Alternatively, if you don't want to purchase your own domain and all developers are on the same network and you are able to control DHCP/DNS, you can setup your own DNS server to include a private route back to 127.0.0.1. Similar concept to the Public DNS option, but a little more brittle since you might allow your devs to work remote, outside of a controlled network.
Connecting by hostname requires that you go through hostname to IP resolution. That's handled by the hosts file and falls back to DNS. This all happens before you ever touch the docker container, and docker machine itself does not have any external hooks to go out and configure your hosts file or DNS servers.
With newer versions of Docker on windows, you run containers with HyperV and networking automatically maps ports to localhost so you can connect to http://localhost. This won't work with docker-machine since it's spinning up virtualbox VM's without the localhost mapping.
If you don't want to configure your hosts file, DNS, and can't use a newer version of docker, you're left with connecting by IP. What you can do is use a free wildcard DNS service like http://xip.io/ that maps any name you want, along with your IP address, back to that same IP address. This lets you use things like a hostname based reverse proxy to connect to multiple containers inside of docker behind the same port.
One last option is to run your docker host VM with a static IP. Docker-machine doesn't support this directly yet, so you can either rely on luck to keep the same IP from a given range, or use another tool like Vagrant to spin up the docker host VM with a static IP on the laptop. Once you have a static IP, you can modify the host file once, create a DNS entry for every dev, or use the same xip.io URL, to access the containers each time.
If you're on a machine with Multicasting DNS (that's Bonjour on a Mac), then the approach that's worked for me is to fire up an Avahi container in the Docker Machine vbox. This lets me refer to VM services at <docker-machine-vm-name>.local. No editing /etc/hosts, no crazy networking settings.
I use different Virtualbox VMs for different projects for my work, which keeps a nice separation of concerns (prevents port collisions, lets me blow away all the containers and images without affecting my other projects, etc.)
Using docker-compose, I just put an Avahi instance at the top of each project:
version: '2'
services:
avahi:
image: 'enernoclabs/avahi:latest'
network_mode: 'host'
Then if I run a webserver in the VM with a docker container forwarding to port 80, it's just http://machine-name.local in the browser.
You can add a domain name entry in your hosts file :
X.X.X.X mymachine # Replace X.X.X.X by the IP of your docker machine
You could also set up a DNS server on your local network if your app is meant to be reachable from your coworkers at your workplace and if your windows machine is meant to remain up as a server.
that would require to make your VM accessible from local network though, but port forwarding could then be a simple solution if your app is the only webservice running on your windows host. (Note that you could as well set up a linux server to avoid using docker-machine on windows, but you would still have to set up a static IP for this server to ensure that your domain name resolution works).
You could also buy your own domain name (or get a free one) and assign it your docker-machine's IP if you don't have rights to write in your hosts file.
But these solution may not work anymore after some time if app host doesn't have a static IP and if your docker-machine IP changes). Not setting up a static IP doesn't imply it will automatically change though, there should be some persistence if you don't erase the machine to create a new one, but that wouldn't be guaranteed either.
Also note that if you set up a DNS server, you'd have to host it on a device with a static IP as well. Your coworkers would then have to configure their machine to use this one.
I suggest nginx-proxy. This is what I use all the time. It comes in especially handy when you are running different containers that are all supposed to answer to the same port (e.g. multiple web-services).
nginx-proxy runs seperately from your service and listens to docker-events to update it's own configuration. After you spun up your service and query the port nginx-proxy is listening to, you will be redirected to your service. Therefore you either need to start nginx-proxy with the DEFAULT_HOST flag or send the desired host as header param with the request.
As I am running this only with plain docker, I don't know if it works with docker-machine, though.
If you go for this option, you can decide for a certain domain (e.g. .docker) to be completely resolved to localhost. This can be either done company-wide by DNS, locally with hosts file or an intermediate resolver (the specific solution depends on your OS, of course). If you then try to reach http://service1.docker nginx-proxy will route to the container that has then ENV VIRTUAL_HOST=service1.docker. This is really convenient, because it only needs one-time setup and is from then on dynamic.

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