pipe2me lets you publish TCP services on the internet that are potentially running behind
a NATting proxy. Note that you need the pipe2me-client package to make sense of this.
pipe2me-client can be found here: https://github.com/kinkome/pipe2me-client
pipe2me manages connections from clients to servers behind a NAT proxy. It allows to access services that you provide on your hardware. pipe2me assigns custom port(s) to your connection, provides a unique domain name and an openssl certificate bound to that domain name.
This document uses these names for the involved machinery:
- server: the pipe2me server. computer which wants to connect
- consumer: a computer which wants to connect
- pod: a computer running a number of services that you want to publish.
Each pipe2me server instance manages a single domain (for example: pipe2.me) and its
subdomains (for example: pink-unicorn.pipe2.me). Each pod gets assigned a unique
subdomain.
An installation guide is in doc/install.md.
The server is run via the monit(1) tool. To configure and run it, just run
~/pipe2me$ rake configure start
Note: There are also rake stop and rake restart commands.
To update the server, change into the server directory and
# stop the server
rake stop
# pull and merge the new software version
git pull
# install dependencies and migrate database, if needed.
bundle install
# start the server again
rake start
The server comes with tests of its own. To run tests, you must, of course configure
and setup this package. After that run the tests via rake:
# run the server tests
bundle exec rake test
You should also run the tests in the pipe2me-client package. See there for more details.
Note: Traffic stats are only estimates at this point.
pipe2me uses the ipconfig tool to collect traffic stats on the various ports
and tunnels. pipe2me is prepared to report a total traffic count to stathat. To
enable this feature define these entries in the server.conf file
STATHAT_EMAIL = "<your stathat email address>"
STATHAT_PREFIX = "live"
Stats are reported via the iptables:report rake task. A whenever configuration
which runs the ipconfig:setup and ipconfig:report tasks every 10 minutes is
prepared in config/schedule.rb. To install it into your crontab, run
whenever --update-crontab
once.
This software is released to you under the terms of the "GNU Affero General Public License, version 3". (See the file COPYING.AGPL for details). That means you are free to use, modify, ad redistribute the software under some conditions that are laid out in the license. In short, you cannot redistribute the software to someone else without giving them the same rights to your modifications that we gave you to our codebase. It also means that you cannot run a modified version of the pipe2me server software without granting access to your modifications under the same terms to the users of your service.
For more details see the file COPYING.APL, for a more thorough discussion compare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License.
pipe2me and pipe2me-client are open sourced. Your contributions and pull requests are welcome.
Please use the git trimWhitespace tool from https://github.com/radiospiel/git-trim-whitespace. It helps tremendously with whitespace issues.
Please read the note on licensing below, though.
If you want to hack on the web backend, you can start developer mode, in which the entire backend is reloaded for each request. Developer mode loads the entire pipe2me server, and runs an additional backend process, which completely reloads for each incoming HTTP(S) request.
# reconfigure and start all processes
rake start
# stop the web process
monit -c monitrc stop web
# start a web process for developer mode. This is expected to run on port 8888
bundle exec shotgun -p 8888
Because we don't know yet if we stick to the AGPL license for the future, we need you to give us the right to relicense your modifications without having to ask you. If you submit a pull request please make sure that you agree to that, or else we cannot merge your changes back into the main codebase. This sounds complicated, but really is not: you could (and probably should) license your contributions under the terms of the MIT License.
If you feel unsure about this feel free to discuss this issue with us.
If you are hosting a domain, want to support this project, and decide to have a look at dnsimple.com, please use this link to sign up with dnsimple: https://dnsimple.com/r/678c541be02c40
Happy tunnelling!
(c) The kinko team, 2014