How to use Pagekite to reach your UBOS Device behind a firewall

If your Device is behind a firewall – such as behind a home broadband router or a company firewall – your firewall will block all incoming traffic and none of the site(s) on your Device are reachable from the public internet. That’s the whole point of a firewall, of course, and a good idea for security reasons.

But what if you do want to make your Site accessible over the internet, either for the general public, or for your friends, or even just for yourself for when you are on the road?

One approach is to register with a dynamic DNS provider, to open a special port in your firewall and forward that special port to the IP address of your Device. This certainly can work, but it tends to be difficult, clumsy (now you need to remember a funny port number!) and is often unreliable; some internet providers block such traffic, others prohibit it in their terms of service, and sometimes the firewalls themselves aren’t cooperating.

About Pagekite

Pagekite.net is open-source software combined with a paid service that has been developed by The Beanstalks Project ehf in Iceland. It provides a much simpler alternative: through some ingenious proxying, Pagekite accepts traffic destined for your device at public servers they run, and then securely routes that traffic to your device by tunneling through your firewall. All without compromising your privacy.

To set it up on UBOS, read on. UBOS bundles all necessary software, and integrates Pagekite a bit more tightly than other Linux distributions, making your life easier. Please ignore the installation instructions on pagekite.net and follow the ones here if you are running Pagekite on UBOS.

Step 1: Sign up for pagekite.net

Go to Pagekite.net and sign up for an account. They have free trials, so you can sign up without cost and see how you like it.

Let’s say you signed as user johndoe and you picked johndoe as your “kite” name, to use their terminology. When you are done with the following setup, you will be able to reach your Device at http://johndoe.pagekite.me/.

Step 2: Make sure you have a Site on your Device that corresponds to your kite name

This only works if you have a Site on your Device that actually corresponds to your kite name, otherwise UBOS will not forward any traffic. So if your Pagekite kite name is johndoe.pagekite.me, make you sure that your Site either has hostname johndoe.pagekite.me or the Wildcard hostname *.

You can determine the hostname of your Site with ubos-admin listsites.

Also note the section on SSL/TLS/HTTPS certificates below.

Step 3: Configure Pagekite on your UBOS Device

Log into your Device. Then, execute the following commands:

% sudo pacman -S --noconfirm pagekite
% sudo ubos-admin start-pagekite <NNN>

where <NNN> is the name of your primary kite (johndoe.pagekite.me in our example). UBOS will then ask you for the secret that goes with this kite. You can find both the kite name and the secret on the pagekite.net website after you have logged into your account there (open section “Your details”). You need to provide this information to UBOS so your Device can be securely paired with your pagekite.net account.

You only need to do this once, for sign-up.

Pagekite status

To determine the status of Pagekite on your Device, execute:

% ubos-admin status-pagekite

Stop using Pagekite on your UBOS device

If you ever wanted to stop using Pagekite, simply execute:

% sudo ubos-admin stop-pagekite

UBOS Site names and Pagekite domain names

If you tell Pagekite.net that your Kite name is johndoe.pagekite.me, all public web traffic to that domain name will be routed to the website johndoe.pagekite.me on your Device, or, if a Site is deployed on your Device with hostname *, to that Site.

If you do not have a Site with hostname johndoe.pagekite.me or * on your Device, you will either be seeing the UBOS “Site not found” error page or a Pagekite error message.

Just like if you access your Device directly, the hostname you type into your browser must match the hostname of the Site you created on your Device. If you use Pagekite, it might be easiest to give the “kite” name to your Site when you create it on UBOS.

Note that Pagekite allows you to use sub-domains at no extra cost, so you could run sites private.johndoe.pagekite.me and business.johndoe.pagekite.me on the same Device, and Pagekite will forward traffic accordingly. To make this easier, you can start Pagekite with:

% sudo ubos-admin start-pagekite --all --kitesecret <SSS> <NNN>

and UBOS will attempt to set up a kite for all Sites you currently have on your Device, and all future Sites you will deploy to your Device in the future. Of course, this only works if you have configured the right “kites” on the pagekite.net site.

Pagekite and SSL/TLS/HTTPS certificates

Encrypting your web traffic, particularly over the open internet, is of course a good idea. The UBOS/Pagekite integration will automatically take care of it if your Site has been set up with a certificate, such as one from Letsencrypt.

If your Site exists already but does not have a certificate yet, we recommend:

1. Get Pagekite working without SSL/TLS/HTTPS first. That makes it easier to troubleshoot if anything should go wrong.

   Make sure you can access your Site without SSL/TLS/HTTPS over the public internet before going to the next step.

2. Then, redeploy your Site after adding the SSL/TLS certificate information. This is described here.