Bridgehead

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.

1. Requirements
   • Hardware
   • Software
     • Git
     • Docker
   • Network
2. Deployment
   • Site name
   • Projects
   • GitLab repository
   • Base Installation
   • Register with Samply.Beam
   • Starting and stopping your Bridgehead
   • Testing your new Bridgehead
   • De-installing a Bridgehead
3. Site-specific configuration
   • HTTPS Access
   • TLS terminating proxies
   • File structure
4. Things you should know
   • Auto-Updates
   • Non-Linux OS
5. Troubleshooting
   • Monitoring
   • Docker Daemon Proxy Configuration
6. License

Requirements

Hardware

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:

• 4 CPU cores
• 32 GB RAM
• 160GB Hard Drive, SSD recommended

Software

You are strongly recommended to install the Bridgehead under a Linux operating system (but see the section 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.

Ensure the following software (or newer) is installed:

• git >= 2.0
• docker >= 20.10.1
• docker-compose >= 2.xx (docker-compose and docker compose are both supported).
• systemd

We recommend to install Docker(-compose) from its official sources as described on the Docker website.

Note for Ubuntu: Please note that snap versions of Docker are not supported.

Network

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)

Note for Ubuntu: Please note that the uncomplicated firewall (ufw) is known to conflict with Docker here.

Deployment

Site name

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.

Site names should adhere to the following conventions:

• They should be lower-case.
• They should generally be named after the city where your site is based, e.g. karlsruhe.
• If you have a multi-part name, please use a hypen ("-") as separator, e.g. le-havre.
• If your site is for testing purposes, rather than production, please append "-test", e.g. zaragoza-test.
• If you are a developer and you are making changes to the Bridgehead, please use your name and append "-dev", e.g. joe-doe-dev.

Projects

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.

To request a new repository, please send an email to one of the following:

• For the bbmri project: bridgehead@helpdesk.bbmri-eric.eu.
• For the ccp project: support-ccp@dkfz-heidelberg.de

Mention which project you belong to, i.e. "bbmri" or "ccp", plus your chosen site name.

We will set the repository up for you. We will then send you:

• A Repository Short Name (RSN). Beware: this is distinct from your site name.
• The repository's URL.
• A token to access the repository.

During the installation, your Bridgehead will download your site's configuration from GitLab. You will receive a weblink to review these settings and make changes as needed. To do this, visit the URL and click on the configuration file (*.conf, depending on your network). Use the blue button to edit it. You will need to check, as a minimum, the following variables:

• SITE_NAME
• SITE_ID
• OPERATOR_FIRST_NAME
• OPERATOR_LAST_NAME
• OPERATOR_EMAIL
• OPERATOR_PHONE

SITE_NAME and SITE_ID should be set to the chosen name for your site. OPERATOR_* should be set to values appropriate for the administrator of your site (see examples in the file).

Once you have made your changes, these will need to be reviewed by members of our team as part of a git pull request. Once accepted, the Bridgehead will automatically re-download these settings as part of its auto-update.

Base Installation

First, get the Bridgehead:

sudo mkdir -p /srv/docker/
sudo git clone https://github.com/samply/bridgehead.git /srv/docker/bridgehead

Then, run the installation script:

cd /srv/docker/bridgehead
sudo ./bridgehead install <PROJECT>

When prompted with "Please enter your site", you should enter the Repository Short Name (RSN) for GitLab that you were given in the previous section.

When prompted with "Please enter the bridgehead's access token for your site configuration repository", you should enter the token for the GitLab repository that was given to you.

You should then be prompted to do the next step:

Register with Samply.Beam

Many Bridgehead services rely on the secure, performant and flexible messaging middleware called Samply.Beam. You will need to register ("enroll") with Samply.Beam by creating a cryptographic key pair for your bridgehead:

cd /srv/docker/bridgehead
sudo ./bridgehead enroll <PROJECT>

... and follow the instructions on the screen. You should then be prompted to do the next step:

Starting and stopping your Bridgehead

If you followed the above steps, your Bridgehead should already be configured to autostart (via systemd). If you would like to start/stop manually:

To start, run

sudo systemctl start bridgehead@<PROJECT>.service

To stop, run

sudo systemctl stop bridgehead@<PROJECT>.service

To enable/disable autostart, run

sudo systemctl [enable|disable] bridgehead@<PROJECT>.service

Testing your new Bridgehead

After starting the Bridgehead, you can watch the initialization process with the following command:

journalctl -u bridgehead@bbmri -f

if this exits with something similar to the following:

bridgehead@bbmri.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE

Then you know that there was a problem with starting the Bridgehead. Scroll up the printout to find the cause of the error.

Once the Bridgehead is running, you can also view the individual Docker processes with:

docker ps

There should be 6 - 10 Docker proceses. If there are fewer, then you know that something has gone wrong. To see what is going on, run:

journalctl -u bridgehead@bbmri -f

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:

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.

De-installing a 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.

To do this, run:

sh bridgehead uninstall

Site-specific configuration

HTTPS Access

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 or DFN-AAI.

TLS terminating proxies

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. 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.
  • /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.
  • /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 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 via systemctl cat bridgehead-update@<PROJECT>.service and systemctl cat bridgehead-update@<PROJECT.timer.

Non-Linux OS

The installation procedures described above have only been tested under Linux.

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!

We believe that it is likely that installation would also work with FreeBSD and MacOS.

Under Windows, you have 2 options:

• Virtual machine
• WSL

We have tested the installation procedure with an Ubuntu 22.04 guest system running on a VMware virtual machine. That worked flawlessly.

Installation under WSL ought to work, but we have not tested this.

Troubleshooting

Monitoring

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.

License

Copyright 2019 - 2022 The Samply Community

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.