Before we dive into the topic, I am sharing several of my typical needs that lead me to learn about something like netbird.
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From my home network, I want to connect to the machines inside the firewall of my work place. For some companies, it may be possible to install the oraganization VPN service on the home computer with which one can connect to the internal network through the VPN. However, in my case, my organization VPN can only be used on the organization-owned machines and therefore there is no way I can use VPN on my home computer for the organization devices connection. My organization support the Citrix connection, but it is often very slow.
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I have some virtual Windows machines (see this blog post for instructions about setting a virtual Windows server inside a docker container) inside my organization firewall and I want to use Windows remote desktop (RDP) to connect to the virtual machine. However, Windows RDP can only connect to machines that are in the same local network with the client machine. Again, VPN is usually used to let the client machine (e.g., the home computer) connect to the remote machine inside the firewall through the VPN. In my case, as I said above, this is also not possible.
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I want to visit some web services that are only accessible through my organization. For example, the email service can only be accessed from within my organization firewall. Another typical need is to access those non-open-access journal publications. Once again, not being able to use the organization VPN on my home machines prevents me from doing such a simple job in a convenient way, unless I am patient enough to go with the very slow Citrix connection.
Having those practical needs for quite a while, I came across a YouTube video the other day introducing some interesting projects on GitHub and one of them is the main topic today – netbird. Since I am not a technical nerd and I don’t have any ideas about netbird and the technique behind it. But it just sounds interesting to me from the YouTube video and I just gave it a check out of curiosity. Checking it out, I found this is just the tool I need for quite a while. Though, I am still not fully into the technical world of the technique behind the scene (which actually seems to be a huge computer science scope from a non CS-major person like myself), I know how the technique is going to fill in my pocket regarding the several typical needs listed above. I think that is enough for me. As for what really is Network Address Translation (NAT) and how the NAT Traversal reall works, I probably will never have the capacity to learn about.
So, in this blog post, I will only cover how I use netbird to meet my practical needs as listed above. At the end of the day, I realized,
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SSH into the machines inside my organization firewall, without using VPN or Citrix, from my home computer.
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Connect to the virtual Windows machine inside my oraganization firewall using Windows RDP from my home computer.
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Visit some (unfortunately, not all) of the web services hosted inside my organization firewall, like the email server. Also, I am able to access those paywall protected journal publications, from my home computer.
Now let’s start. First, we need to create a netbird account. Just go the website https://app.netbird.io/ and we can use Google, Microsoft or Github account to log in. For sure, we can also register an account with an email, either way.
Once the account is ready and we successfull log in, we will be presented with the Peers interface in the dashboard. If it is the first time of login, we will be prompted with the installation instructions and we should follow the instructions there to install the netbird software on the machines that we want to inter-connect. In my case, I have my home desktop machine and several machines that I am in charge of (meaning I can install software on them) inside my organization firewall. For each of the machines, I need to install the netbird software and the installation instructions can be found in Ref. [1, 2] – Ref. [1] is just the prompted interface for the first-time login. Once the netbird software is installed on my machines, we need to log in with the netbird account. Usually, this is the email address associated with the netbird account. On different operating systems, the login procedure may be different but it is straightforward to follow – usually, we need to visit some redirected URL for the login purpose. Once logged in locally on our machines, the corresponding machines will appear in the Peers list in the netbird dashboard,
Now, all the machines appearing in the list form a ‘local’ network and they can now connect to each other directly, in a peer-to-peer manner. Each peer in the list is assigned a ‘local’ IP address and we can connect to each of those ‘local’ IP addresses from any of the machines in the list. Also, we can edit those machines to give them some meaningful name and the name will become part of the secondary domain name which can also be used for the connection (again, among machines inside such a ‘local’ network). Here I include local inside the quotatin mark since it is not really a local network, but the way they can connect to each other seems just like a local network.
…to continue