cells_private_ip.md

Note: This is a legacy issue. The root cause has been internally solved and you shouldn't bump in this problem anymore with Cells v4 (or more recent version).

When starting cells, you see this warning in your logs:

Warning: no private IP detected for binding broker. Will bind to <YOUR PUBLIC IP ADDRESS>, which may give public access to the broker.

You should solve this issue by adding a virtual NIC on your machine or you might be at risk (depending onn how secure is your network).

Overview

Internally, Pydio Cells is implemented with a microservice oriented architecture: each simple feature is implemented as an independant brick that exposes a set of internal APIs inside Cells.

All microservices communicate together via gRPC, a HTML2 based protocol. It is important that this communication happens on a private network for better security.

On single instance servers, this is done by using a private IP of the server.

How to fix

There are many ways to declare a private virtual interface. A few examples:

With docker

If you have docker installed on your machine, launch the service:
the docker daemon creates a virtual private network that can be used by Cells.

On Debian like

If your main interface is called eno1, make a backup of your /etc/network/interfaces file and append this:

# virtual IP on eno1
auto eno1:0
iface eno1:0 inet static
address 10.0.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 10.0.0.0
broadcast 10.0.0.255

From your comand line, mount the virtual NIC and list all:

sudo ifup eno1:0
sudo ip address

On RHEL like

Your main interface is called eth0, adapt otherwise.

sudo tee /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0:0 << EOF
DEVICE="eth0:0"
ONBOOT="yes"
BOOTPROTO="static"
IPADDR="10.0.0.1"
NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
BROADCAST="10.0.0.1"
EOF

# Start the interface and check new IP
sudo ifup eth0:0
sudo ip address