Making a PowerVC Proxy

Edit: The link no longer works.

Originally posted July 24, 2018 on AIXchange

As I’ve noted numerous times, Twitter is a great resource for anyone who wants to learn about what’s new in the world of AIX and IBM Power Systems.

Case in point, Chris Gibson (@cgibbo) pointed to this article on setting up an HTTP proxy on PowerVC:

Have you ever struggled to give your end users access to the PowerVC UI, but don’t want to give them real access to the PowerVC host? For example, I’ve seen a few scenarios recently where we want to make PowerVC UI publicly available, but still need PowerVC itself sitting on an internal private network with connections to the private management infrastructure. There are a number of ways you can go about doing this with port forwarding, iptables rules, etc. But perhaps the easiest way to do this is to set up a very simple light-weight HTTP proxy with NGINX.

Install nginx. On Ubuntu/Debian, simply run: sudo apt install nginx. On Redhat, run: sudo yum install nginx

nginx should start automatically. If not, run: sudo systemctl start nginx

Remove the default config file: sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Install ssl-cert. This will allow automatic generation of self-signed ssl certificates:  sudo apt install ssl-cert or sudo yum install ssl-cert.

Add the following configuration file, modifying the 10.0.0.10 IP address to match that of your PowerVC server (paste this entire entry into a bash shell)

Finally, restart nginx (sudo systemctl restart nginx), and point your web browser to http://X.X.X.9 and you should see the PowerVC GUI.

Read the whole thing for the actual code and a detailed explanation. Also be sure to check out this specific information on NGINX, which is linked at the end of the document.