[Ground-station] "Hello World" acceptance testing for test equipment

[Dan White]

On Tue, Nov 3, 2020 at 11:04 PM Paul Williamson via Ground-Station
<ground-station at lists.openresearch.institute> wrote:

> > On Nov 3, 2020, at 7:50 PM, Drew Arnett <arnett.drew at gmail.com> wrote:
> >  If folks need to use the gear remotely, they can remote into the
> > test control PC that is multihomed on the test equipment LAN.
>
> That’s one good way to do it, but it might not always be the best. I’m
> thinking that a Linux box can do access control and also provide VPN access
> to the test equipment LAN. I’m prototyping that right now with a Raspberry
> Pi 4, which may well end up being sufficient for production. Some tests
> will probably be easier to run on the Pi and some will be easier to run on
> Windows or whatever else we have.
>

I have been using https://tailscale.com/ for VPN-like access to my lab's
subnetwork.  I've just started giving students access also and it has been
super great.  They can have their Raspberry Pi at their apartment to work
on stuff, yet anyone in the auth list can ssh into it (e.g. for help) as if
it is on the LAN and point-to-point.  IP addresses don't change even when
the device's does and it handles all of the NAT.
https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works/  is a nice overview of the
setup.

Because it is point-to-point, I've been able to run rtl_tcp on a Pi on our
roof and connect to the stream with my phone at home

The current down side is that they don't do their own authentication,
leaving that for external providers  Supported SSO/IDP/IAM providers
<https://tailscale.com/kb/1013/sso-providers> .   They are also not quite
setup for multiple users from anything other than the same domain.

It has allowed my students to keep engaged in lab work despite quarantine
restrictions, so I'm just a happy user.


Dan White

---
@ValpoWIREDlab <https://twitter.com/ValpoWIREDlab>
Electrical and Computer Engineering
College of Engineering
Valparaiso University
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