The Bridgehead is a secure, low-effort solution to connect your research institution to a federated research network. It bundles interoperable, open-source software components into a turnkey package for installation on one of your secure servers. The Bridgehead is pre-configured with sane defaults, centrally monitored and with an absolute minimum of "moving parts" on your side, making it an extremely low-maintenance gateway to data sharing.
This repository is the starting point for any information and tools you will need to deploy a Bridgehead. If you have questions, please [contact us](mailto:verbis-support@dkfz-heidelberg.de).
Hardware requirements strongly depend on the specific use-cases of your network as well as on the data it is going to serve. Most use-cases are well-served with the following configuration:
You are strongly recommended to install the Bridgehead under a Linux operating system (but see the section [Non-Linux OS](#non-linux-os)). You will need root (administrator) priveleges on this machine in order to perform the deployment. We recommend the newest Ubuntu LTS server release.
Since it needs to carry sensitive patient data, Bridgeheads are intended to be deployed within your institution's secure network and behave well even in networks in strict security settings, e.g. firewall rules. The only connectivity required is an outgoing HTTPS proxy. TLS termination is supported, too (see [below](#tls-terminating-proxies))
You will need to choose a short name for your site. This is not a URL, just a simple identifying string. For the examples below, we will use "your-site-name", but you should obviously choose something that is meaningful to you and which is unique.
The following "projects" are known to the Bridgehead installation:
- bbmri
- ccp
Use "bbmri" if you are in the BBMRI-ERIC European biobank network or the GBA (German Biobank Alliance) network.
Use "ccp" if you are in the DKTK network, the C4 network or the nNGM network.
### GitLab repository
In order to be able to install, you will need to have your own repository in GitLab for your site's configuration settings. This allows automated updates of the Bridgehead software.
Many Bridgehead services rely on the secure, performant and flexible messaging middleware called [Samply.Beam](https://github.com/samply/beam). You will need to register ("enroll") with Samply.Beam by creating a cryptographic key pair for your bridgehead:
Once the Bridgehead has passed these checks, take a look at the landing page:
```
https://localhost
```
You can either do this in a browser or with curl. If you visit the URL in the browser, you will neet to click through several warnings, because you will initially be using a self-signed certificate. With curl, you can bypass these checks:
```shell
curl -k https://localhost
```
If you get errors when you do this, you need to use ```docker logs``` to examine your landing page container in order to determine what is going wrong.
If you have chosen to take part in our monitoring program (by setting the ```MONITOR_APIKEY``` variable in the configuration), you will be informed by email when problems are detected in your Bridgehead.
You may decide that you want to remove a Bridgehead installation from your machine, e.g. if you want to migrate it to a new location or if you want to start a fresh installation because the initial attempts did not work.
Even within your internal network, the Bridgehead enforces HTTPS for all services. During the installation, a self-signed, long-lived certificate was created for you. To increase security, you can simply replace the files under `/etc/bridgehead/traefik-tls` with ones from established certification authorities such as [Let's Encrypt](https://letsencrypt.org) or [DFN-AAI](https://www.aai.dfn.de).
All of the Bridgehead's outgoing connections are secured by transport encryption (TLS) and a Bridgehead will refuse to connect if certificate verification fails. If your local forward proxy server performs TLS termination, please place its CA certificate in `/etc/bridgehead/trusted-ca-certs` as a `.pem` file, e.g. `/etc/bridgehead/trusted-ca-certs/mylocalca.pem`. Then, all Bridgehead components will pick up this certificate and trust it for outgoing connections.
### File structure
-`/srv/docker/bridgehead` contains this git repository with the shell scripts and *project-specific configuration*. In here, all files are identical for all sites. You should not make any changes here.
-`/etc/bridgehead` contains your *site-specific configuration* synchronized from your site-specific git repository as part of the [base installation](#base-installation). To change anything here, please consult your git repository (find out its URL via `git -C /etc/bridgehead remote -v`).
-`/etc/bridgehead/<PROJECT>.conf` is your main site-specific configuration, all bundled into one concise config file. Do not change it here but via the central git repository.
-`/etc/bridgehead/<PROJECT>.local.conf` contains site-specific parameters to be known to your Bridgehead only, e.g. local access credentials. The file is ignored via git, and you may edit it here via a text editor.
-`/etc/bridgehead/traefik-tls` contains your Bridgehead's reverse proxies TLS certificates for [HTTPS access](#https-access).
-`/etc/bridgehead/pki` contains your Bridgehead's private key (e.g., but not limited to Samply.Beam), generated as part of the [Samply.Beam enrollment](#register-with-samplybeam).
-`/etc/bridgehead/trusted-ca-certs` contains third-party certificates to be trusted by the Bridgehead. For example, you want to place the certificates of your [TLS-terminating proxy](#network) here.
Your Bridgehead's actual data is not stored in the above directories, but in named docker volumes, see `docker volume ls` and `docker volume inspect <volume_name>`.
## Things you should know
### Auto-Updates
Your Bridgehead will automatically and regularly check for updates. Whenever something has been updates (e.g., one of the git repositories or one of the docker images), your Bridgehead is automatically restarted. This should happen automatically and does not need any configuration.
If you would like to understand what happens exactly and when, please check the systemd units deployed during the [installation](#base-installation) via `systemctl cat bridgehead-update@<PROJECT>.service` and `systemctl cat bridgehead-update@<PROJECT.timer`.
Below are some suggestions for getting the installation to work on other operating systems. Note that we are not able to provide support for these routes!
To keep all Bridgeheads up and working and detect any errors before a user does, a central monitoring
- Your Bridgehead itself will report relevant system events, such as successful/failed updates, restarts, performance metrics or version numbers.
- Your Bridgehead is also monitored from the outside by your network's central components. For example, the federated search will regularly perform a black-box test by sending an empty query to your Bridgehead and checking if the results make sense.
In all monitoring cases, obviously no sensitive information is transmitted, in particular not any patient-related data. Aggregated data, e.g. total amount of datasets, may be transmitted for diagnostic purposes.
### Docker Daemon Proxy Configuration
Docker has a background daemon, responsible for downloading images and starting them. Sometimes, proxy configuration from your system won't carry over and it will fail to download images. In that case, configure the proxy for this daemon as described in the [official documentation](https://docs.docker.com).
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.
