SME Appliance System Admin Guide

The SME platform is built using open Internet technologies. The base operating system used s hardened Linux CentOS. HTTPD Apache Server is used for serving http requests and for temporary caching memcached is used. File Metadata is stored using a MySQL database.

The web interface is written in using PHP / HTML / Ajax, and protocol adapters are written using Perl.

By using standard components SME can be adopted and customized to a wide variety of deployments.

A standard firewall friendly protocol HTTPS is used for communicating with the clients.

The basic premises of SME is to act as a cloud gateway and audit, control and encryption point. All the files and data are stored in the provider. The SME platform only keeps the meta data e.g. file name, size (if available), security permissions.

The apache server is stateless and can run on a separate host from the MySQL DB Server. This allows flexibility in deployment topologies for scalability and high availability using proven deployment configurations supported by apache web server (e.g. multiple web servers behind a load balancer) and MySQL DB (replication, data sharding).

SME is built as an open modular platform. All the functionality is available via the SME API and major components have hook points to integrate external system .e.g authentication , a new storage provider, payment gateway etc.

Details of the SME API can be found at:

https://storagemadeeasy.com/for_developers/

Protocol Adaptors

At the top of the SME Architecture diagram are protocol adapters The allow to access your data using multiple protocols from any supported storage provider.

Out of the box SME supports:

• REST/XML and REST/JSON: SME proprietary API. This is used by all the SME tools, is fully documented and can be used to develop custom applications.
• WebDav/HTTPS: Standard WebDav is protocol especially useful for iOS apps (Pages, Keynote, Numbers) that support WebDav
• FTP/FTPS: Standard FTP and FTP Secure protocol

Provider Sync Engine

The provider Sync Engine s used to discover new data added to the provider outside of SME. Can run in realtime, scheduled and manual mode.

• Real-time: new data is checked every time storage provider is accessed. For optimum performance only relevant subset of data is checked for new data.
• Scheduled: storage provider is accessed at schedule interval.
• Manual: Administrator initiates a sync

Multi-Site Backup Engine

Used to backup files updated via SME platform to another storage provider for disaster recovery and availability.

Access Control Module

The ACL module is responsible for applying permissions. Every operation is verified by the access control module to ascertain that the user has permission to perform the operation

Audit Manager

The Audit module is used by all components to generate audit records for all file interactions. The granularity of this can be controlled at a per Organization level.

Encryption Engine

The Encryption engine s used to encrypt data before sending to a remote cloud provider. It uses 256 bit encryption to encrypt data at rest. Further details on how this works and security can be referenced in the SME Security white paper.

Payment Gateway

The Payment Gateway enables Integration with external billing system and supports PayPal and Sage.

Custom payment gateways can also be integrated.

Storage Connectors

SME supports more that 60 cloud storage providers including Amazon S3, OpenStack, MS Azure, Google Storage, WebDav and FTP.

Additional providers can be easily developed using a storage providers native API

Protocol Adaptors

The protocol adaptors are the front end adaptors that are additional to the SME API. They enable access from a compatible S3 API, FTP/S, or Secure WebDav.

For these commands you will need to su as root

$ ssh smeconfiguser@appliance IP address
# after login su as root//
-bash-3.2$ su - root
Password:
root@appliance:~ #
  

Security Enhanced Linux (selinux)

selinux is enabled by default.

Check Status of selinx

    sestatus
    SELinux status:                 enabled
    SELinuxfs mount:                /sys/fs/selinux
    SELinux root directory:         /etc/selinux
    Loaded policy name:             targeted
    Current mode:                   enforcing
    Mode from config file:          enforcing
    Policy MLS status:              enabled
    Policy deny_unknown status:     allowed
    Max kernel policy versions:     28

Temporarily Disable selinux

You can temporarily disable sexlinux by running the following command.

  echo 0 >/selinux/enforce

Enable selinux

To enable selinux run the command

  echo 1 >/selinux/enforce

Cloud FTP

CloudFTP is an FTP implementation on top of Clouds that do not natively support FTP. Once a Cloud has been added to an account, you can access it from any FTP Client.

Stopping CloudFTP

  service cloudftp stop
  stopping cloud ftp...

Starting CloudFTP

  service cloudftp start
  starting cloud ftp...
  starting cloud ftps...
  starting cloud sftp...

Apache HTTP Server

Start HTTP Server

  service httpd start

Stop HTTP Server

  service httpd stop

HTTPD Logs

Httpd server logs are located at /etc/httpd/logs

HTTPD Configuration

HTTPD server configuration files are located in the following 2 directories

/etc/httpd/conf

/etc/httpd/conf.d

MySQL Database

Start MySQL

  service mysqld start

Stop MySQL

service mysqld stop

MySQL Data Files

/var/lib/mysql

MySQL Configuration

/etc/my.cnf

Backup MySQL Database

You can backup the meta-data database using the following command

mysqldump -p   smestorage >smestorage.sql

Memcached

Start Memcached

service memcached start
  

Stop Memcached

  service memcached stop

Memcached Config File

  /etc/sysconfig/memcached
  

FTP Server

Start FTP Server

service vsftpd start
  

Stop FTP Server

  service vsftpd stop

FTP Server Configuration

/etc/vsftpd

Application Log Location

The SME appliacation logs are located at

  /var/www/smestorage/sitelogs

A brief description below

  * allmails.txt all sent mails to address and subject are logged here
  * errorlogs.txt Any application error is logged here
  * errorlogs_trace.txt Contains full trace of errors in errorlogs.txt
  * logits.txt All general application logging

You can use any tool that support monitoring CentOS 5.8.

We recommend monitoring the following parameters

Base OS

vmstat    
Procs           
r: The number of processes waiting for run time.           
b: The number of processes in uninterruptible sleep.     
Memory           
swpd: the amount of virtual memory used.           
free: the amount of idle memory.           
active: the amount of active memory.       
Swap           
si: Amount of memory swapped in from disk (/s).           
so: Amount of memory swapped to disk (/s).     
IO           
bi: Blocks received from a block device (blocks/s).           
bo: Blocks sent to a block device (blocks/s).     
CPU           
us: Time spent running non-kernel code. (user time, including nice time)           
sy: Time spent running kernel code. (system time)           
id: Time spent idle.             
st: Time stolen from a virtual machine.%%''

Disk Space

df -k
Filesystem                1K-blocks         Used Available Use% Mounted on/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00                                 18187836    2903080   14345956   17% //dev/sda1
     101086        20047      75820   21% /boottmpfs
     512468            0     512468    0% /dev/shm%%'

MySQL

Number of connections

SHOW STATUS LIKE "Connections"

Network Usage

Monitor the network traffic using your monitoring system. Or you can get the information from

cat /proc/net/dev

Total Number of Processes

ps -e|sed 1d|wc -l

Recipes

Increasing Disk Space

To increase the disk space please follow the instructions at the following vmware kb article

Attaching a new Disk to The Appliance

To add a new disk to the appliance please follow the instructions at the following vmware kb article

Using a New Disk as Local Storage

The appliance is already configured with an FTP server listening on ip address 127.0.0.1 and port 2001.

• Add a new user with user home directory located on the newly attached disk mounted at newdisk

  adduser   -b /newdisk   -s /sbin/nologin localstorage#change the

  passwd localstorage

• Set home directory context for /newdisk/localstorage

  chcon -R -t userhomedir_t   /newdisk/localstorage

• Now you can add the a FTP provider to your SME account using the credentials
  • account login:localstorage
  • account password: the password you entered for localstorage user
  • server host:ftp://127.0.0.1
  • server port:2001
  • server home directory:/

Production CheckList

• [ ] SSL certificate Installed
• [ ]Once you have installed SSL certificates enable https only in the configuration
• [ ] Only have inbound port 443 open. If you are using CloudFTP then also open port 21 and 990
• [ ] Permanent IP address Configured
• [ ] DNS Names Configured. Make sure webdav DNS is configured as webdav<DomaninName> e.g. if domain name is sme.yourdomain.com then webdav url should be webdavsme.yourdomain.com.
• [ ] Passwords changed for default users
• [ ] The date and time is set correctly in the appliance and not drifting.