teleport/docs/2.7/quickstart-enterprise.md

Teleport Enterprise Quick Start

Welcome to the Quick Start Guide for Teleport Enterprise.

The goal of this document is to show off the basic capabilities of Teleport. There are three types of services Teleport nodes can run: nodes, proxies and auth servers.

• Auth servers are the core of a cluster. Auth servers store user accounts and provide authentication and authorization services for every node and every user in a cluster.
• Proxy servers route client connection requests to the appropriate node and serve a Web UI which can also be used to log into SSH nodes. Every client-to-node connection in Teleport must be routed via a proxy.
• Nodes are regular SSH servers, similar to the sshd daemon you may be familiar with. When a node receives a connection request, the request is authenticated through the cluster's auth server.

The teleport daemon runs all three of these services by default. This Quick Start Guide will be using this default behavior to create a cluster and interact with it using Teleport's client-side tools:

Tool	Description
tctl	Cluster administration tool used to invite nodes to a cluster and manage user accounts.
tsh	Similar in principle to OpenSSH's ssh. Used to login into remote SSH nodes, list and search for nodes in a cluster, securely upload/download files, etc.
browser	You can use your web browser to login into any Teleport node by opening https://<proxy-host>:3080.

Prerequisites

You will need to have access to the customer portal to download the software. You will also need three computers: two servers and one client (probably a laptop) to complete this tutorial. Lets assume the servers have the following DNS names and IPs:

Server Name	IP Address	Purpose
"auth.example.com"	10.1.1.10	This server will be used to run all three Teleport services: auth, proxy and node.
"node.example.com"	10.1.1.11	This server will only run the SSH service. The vast majority of servers in production will be nodes.

This Quick Start Guide assumes that the both servers are running a systemd-based Linux distribution such as Debian, Ubuntu or a RHEL deriviative.

Installing

To start using Teleport Enterprise, you will need to Download the binaries and the license file from the customer portal. After downloading the binary tarball, run:

$ tar -xzf teleport-ent-binary-release.tar.gz
$ cd teleport-ent

• Copy teleport and tctl binaries to a bin directory (we suggest /usr/local/bin) on the auth server.
• Copy teleport binary to a bin directory on the node server.
• Copy tsh binary to a bin directory on the client computer.

License File

The Teleport license file contains a X.509 certificate and the corresponding private key in PEM format.

Download the license file from the customer portal and save it as /var/lib/teleport/license.pem on the auth server.

Configuration File

Save the following configuration file as /etc/teleport.yaml on the node.example.com:

teleport:
  auth_token: dogs-are-much-nicer-than-cats
  # you can also use auth server's IP, i.e. "10.1.1.10:3025"
  auth_servers: [ "auth.example.com:3025" ]

  # enable ssh service and disable auth and proxy:
ssh_service:
  enabled: true

auth_service:
  enabled: false
proxy_service:
  enabled: false

Now, save the following configuration file as /etc/teleport.yaml on the auth.example.com:

teleport:
  auth_token: dogs-are-much-nicer-than-cats
  auth_servers: [ "localhost:3025" ]

auth_service:
  # enable the auth service:
  enabled: true

  tokens:
  # this static token is used for other nodes to join this Teleport cluster
  - proxy,node:dogs-are-much-nicer-than-cats
  # this token is used to establish trust with other Teleport clusters
  - trusted_cluster:trains-are-superior-to-cars

  # by default, local authentication will be used with 2FA
  authentication:
      second_factor: otp

  # SSH is also enabled on this node:
ssh_service:
  enabled: "yes"

Systemd Unit File

Next, download the systemd service unit file from examples directory on Github and save it as /etc/systemd/system/teleport.service on both servers.

# run this on both servers:
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable teleport

Starting

# run this on both servers:
$ sudo systemctl start teleport

Teleport daemon should start and you can use netstat -lptne to make sure that it's listening on TCP/IP ports. On auth.example.com, it should look something like this:

$ auth.example.com ~: sudo netstat -lptne
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address   State       User       PID/Program name    
tcp6       0      0 :::3024         LISTEN      0          337/teleport        
tcp6       0      0 :::3025         LISTEN      0          337/teleport        
tcp6       0      0 :::3080         LISTEN      0          337/teleport        
tcp6       0      0 :::3022         LISTEN      0          337/teleport        
tcp6       0      0 :::3023         LISTEN      0          337/teleport        

and node.example.com should look something like this:

$ node.example.com ~: sudo netstat -lptne
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address   State       User       PID/Program name    
tcp6       0      0 :::3022         LISTEN      0          337/teleport        

See troubleshooting section at the bottom if something is not working.

Adding Users

This portion of the Quick Start Guide should be performed on the auth server, i.e. on auth.example.com

Every user in a Teleport cluster must be assigned at least one role. By default, Teleport comes with one pre-configured role called "admin". You can see it's definition by executing sudo tctl get roles/admin > admin-role.yaml.

The output will look like this (re-formatted here to use compact YAML representation for brevity):

kind: role
version: v3
metadata:
  name: admin
spec:
  options:
    cert_format: standard
    forward_agent: true
    max_session_ttl: 30h0m0s
    port_forwarding: true
  # allow rules:
  allow:
    logins:
    - '{{internal.logins}}'
    - root
    node_labels:
      '*': '*'
    rules:
    - resources: [role]
      verbs: [list, create, read, update, delete]
    - resources: [auth_connector]
      verbs: [list, create, read, update, delete]
    - resources: [session]
      verbs: [list, read]
    - resources: [trusted_cluster]
      verbs: [list, create, read, update, delete]
  # no deny rules are present, the admin role must have access to everything)
  deny: {}

Pay attention to the allow/logins field in the role definition: by default, this role only allows SSH logins as root@host.

!!! note "Note" Ignore {{internal.logins}} "allowed login" for now. It exists for compatibility purposes when upgrading existing open source Teleport clusters.

You probably want to replace "root" with something else. Let's assume there will be a local UNIX account called "admin" on all hosts. In this case you cand dump the role definition YAML into admin-role.yaml file and update "allow/logins" to look like this:

allow:
   logins: [admin]

Then send it back into Teleport:

$ sudo tctl create -f admin-role.yaml

Now, lets create a new Teleport user "joe" with "admin" role:

$ sudo tctl users add --roles=admin joe

Signup token has been created and is valid for 1 hours. Share this URL with the user:
https://auth.example.com:3080/web/newuser/22e3acb6a0c2cde22f13bdc879ff9d2a

Share the generated sign-up URL with Joe and let him pick a password and configure the second factor authentication. We recommend Google Authenticator which is available for both Android and iPhone.

Assigning Roles

To update user's roles, dump the user resoure into a file:

$ sudo tctl get users/joe > joe.yaml

Edit the YAML file and update the "roles" array. Then, re-insert it back:

$ sudo tctl create -f joe.yaml

Logging In

Joe now has a local account on a Teleport cluster. The local account is good for administrative purposes but regular users of Teleport Enterprise should be using a Single Sign-On (SSO) mechanism.

But first, lets see how Joe can log into the Teleport cluster. He can do this on his client laptop:

$ tsh --proxy=auth.example.com --insecure login --user=joe

Note that "--user=joe" part can be omitted if $USER environment variable is "joe".

Notice that tsh client always needs --proxy flag because all client connections in Teleport always must to go through an SSH proxy, sometimes called an "SSH bastion".

!!! warning "Warning": For the purposes of this quickstart we are using the --insecure flag which allows us to skip configuring the HTTP/TLS certificate for Teleport proxy. Never use --insecure in production. You must configure the HTTP/TLS proxy certificate.

If successful, tsh login command will receive Joe's user certificate and will store it in ~/.tsh/keys/<proxy> directory.

With a certificate in place, Joe can now interact with the Teleport cluster:

# SSH into any host behind the proxy:
$ tsh ssh node.example.com

# See what hosts are available behind the proxy:
$ tsh ls

# Log out (this will remove the user certificate from ~/.tsh)
$ tsh logout

Configuring SSO

The local account is good for administrative purposes but regular users of Teleport Enterprise should be using a Single Sign-On (SSO) mechanism commonly availalbe by SSO providers that commonly implement SAML or OIDC protocols.

Take a look at the SSH via Single Sign-on chapter learn the basics of integrating Teleport with SSO providers. We have the following detailed guides for configuring SSO providers:

• Okta
• Active Directory
• One Login
• Github

Any SAML-compliant provider can be configured with Teleport by following the same steps. There are Teleport Enterprise customers who are using Oracle IDM, SailPoint and others.

Troubleshooting

If Teleport services do not start, take a look at the syslog:

$ sudo journalctl -fu teleport

Usually the error will be reported there. Common reasons for failure are:

• Mismatched tokens, i.e. "auth_token" on the node does not match "tokens/node" value on the auth server.
• Network issues: port 3025 is closed via iptables.
• Network issues: ports 3025 or 3022 are occupied by another process.
• Disk issues: Teleport fails to create /var/lib/teleport because the volume is read-only or not accessible.

Getting Help

If something is not working, please reach out to us by creating a ticket in your customer portal. Customers who have purchased the premium support package can also ping us through your Slack channel.