A certificate challenge nonce is accepted for its own window and the one before it, and it only reaches a peer attached to a network map. An account where nothing changes sends no map, so after a day the peer re-sends the nonce it still holds, verification rejects its whole proof set, and the certificates stored for it are dropped. It fails the certificate check and loses every policy gated on it until some unrelated change happens to push a map. The outage repairs itself in seconds, which is what makes it expensive: it is intermittent, it only hits stable networks, and it is not reproducible on demand. Push the account's peers an update often enough that the nonce they hold is never close to expiring. Only accounts whose posture checks actually ask for a certificate are tracked, so a deployment without the feature does no extra work. The refresh runs from one goroutine over a map of accounts rather than a timer per account: the period is hours, so one pass every few minutes costs nothing next to it, and there is no timer to re-arm when an account that falls due sooner appears. Each account's first run is offset by a hash of its ID, because the challenge window is global and an instance restart would otherwise arm every account in the same moment. The push carries no administrative change, so it is counted as a refresh rather than an update and stays out of the figures that track what was edited.
netbird Management Server
netbird management server will control and synchronize peers configuration within your Netbird account and network.
Command Options
The CLI accepts the command management with the following options:
start Netbird Management Server
Usage:
netbird-mgmt management [flags]
Flags:
--cert-file string Location of your SSL certificate. Can be used when you have an existing certificate and don't want a new certificate be generated automatically. If letsencrypt-domain is specified this property has no effect
--cert-key string Location of your SSL certificate private key. Can be used when you have an existing certificate and don't want a new certificate be generated automatically. If letsencrypt-domain is specified this property has no effect
--datadir string server data directory location
-h, --help help for management
--letsencrypt-domain string a domain to issue Let's Encrypt certificate for. Enables TLS using Let's Encrypt. Will fetch and renew certificate, and run the server with TLS
--port int server port to listen on (default 33073)
Global Flags:
--config string Netbird config file location to write new config to (default "/etc/netbird")
--log-file string sets Netbird log path. If console is specified the the log will be output to stdout (default "/var/log/netbird/management.log")
--log-level string (default "info")
Run Management service (Docker)
You can run service in 2 modes - with TLS or without (not recommended).
Run with TLS (Let's Encrypt).
By specifying the --letsencrypt-domain the daemon will handle SSL certificate request and configuration.
In the following example 33073 is the management service default port, and 443 will be used as port for Let's Encrypt challenge and HTTP API.
The server where you are running a container has to have a public IP (for Let's Encrypt certificate challenge).
Replace with your server's public domain (e.g. mydomain.com or subdomain sub.mydomain.com).
# create a volume
docker volume create netbird-mgmt
# run the docker container
docker run -d --name netbird-management \
-p 33073:33073 \
-p 443:443 \
-v netbird-mgmt:/var/lib/netbird \
-v ./config.json:/etc/netbird/config.json \
netbirdio/management:latest \
--letsencrypt-domain <YOUR-DOMAIN>
An example of config.json can be found here management.json
Trigger Let's encrypt certificate generation:
curl https://<YOUR-DOMAIN>
The certificate will be persisted in the datadir/letsencrypt/ folder (e.g. /var/lib/netbird/letsencrypt/) inside the container.
Make sure that the datadir is mapped to some folder on a host machine. In case you used the volume command, you can run the following to retrieve the Mountpoint:
docker volume inspect netbird-mgmt
[
{
"CreatedAt": "2021-07-25T20:45:28Z",
"Driver": "local",
"Labels": {},
"Mountpoint": "/var/lib/docker/volumes/mgmt/_data",
"Name": "netbird-mgmt",
"Options": {},
"Scope": "local"
}
]
Consequent restarts of the container will pick up previously generated certificate so there is no need to trigger certificate generation with the curl command on every restart.
Run without TLS.
# create a volume
docker volume create netbird-mgmt
# run the docker container
docker run -d --name netbird-management \
-p 33073:33073 \
-v netbird-mgmt:/var/lib/netbird \
-v ./config.json:/etc/netbird/config.json \
netbirdio/management:latest
Debug tag
We also publish a docker image with the debug tag which has the log-level set to default, plus it uses the gcr.io/distroless/base:debug image that can be used with docker exec in order to run some commands in the Management container.
shell $ docker run -d --name netbird-management-debug \
-p 33073:33073 \
-v netbird-mgmt:/var/lib/netbird \
-v ./config.json:/etc/netbird/config.json \
netbirdio/management:debug-latest
shell $ docker exec -ti netbird-management-debug /bin/sh
container-shell $
For development purposes:
Install golang gRpc tools:
#!/bin/bash
go install google.golang.org/protobuf/cmd/protoc-gen-go@v1.26
go install google.golang.org/grpc/cmd/protoc-gen-go-grpc@v1.1
Generate gRpc code:
#!/bin/bash
protoc -I proto/ proto/management.proto --go_out=. --go-grpc_out=.