4.2. SSH Containers

Abstract

Fabric allows you to install containers in a local network using SSH. Fabric installs the container from scratch and configures the container to join the Fabric cluster automatically.

Overview

An SSH container is just a Fabric container that is running on a remote host on your local network, where that host is accessible through the SSH protocol. This section describes some basic administration tasks for these SSH containers.

Prerequisites

The requirements for creating an SSH container on a remote host are:
  • Linux or UNIX operating system,
  • SSHD running on the target host and:
    • A valid account credentials, or
    • Configured public key authentication
  • Java is installed (for supported versions, see Red Hat JBoss A-MQ Supported Configurations).
  • Curl installed.
  • GNU tar installed.
  • Telnet installed.

Creating an SSH container

Fabric provides the fabric:container-create-ssh console command, for creating SSH containers.
Given the host, myhost (accessible from the local network) with the SSH user account, myuser, and the password, mypassword, your could create an SSH container on myhost, using the following console command: 
fabric:container-create-ssh --host myhost --user myuser --password mypassword myremotecontainername
If the myuser user on myhost has configured public key authentication for SSH, you can skip the password option: 
fabric:container-create-ssh --host myhost --user myuser myremotecontainername
Where the preceding command uses the key located in ~/.ssh/id_rsa for authentication. If you need to use a different key, you can specify the key location explicitly with the --private-key option: 
fabric:container-create-ssh --host myhost --user myuser --private-key ~/.ssh/fabric_pk myremotecontainername
The last command also supports the --pass-phrase option, in case your key requires a pass phrase.

Creating a Fabric server using SSH

Sometimes you do not have an existing fabric and you want to create one on a remote host. The starting point for any fabric is a Fabric server instance, which can act as a seed for the rest of the fabric. So, to enable you to create a new fabric on a remote host, the fabric:container-create-ssh supports the --ensemble-server option, which can be invoked to create a container which is a Fabric server. For example, the following container-create-ssh command creates a new fabric consisting of one Fabric server on the myhost host: 
fabric:container-create-ssh --host myhost --user myuser --ensemble-server myremotecontainername

Managing remote SSH containers

Using JBoss Fuse console commands, you can stop, restart or delete (that is, uninstall) a remote container, as follows:
To stop an SSH container: 
fabric:container-stop myremotecontainername
To restart an SSH container: 
fabric:container-start myremotecontainername
To uninstall an SSH container: 
fabric:container-delete myremotecontainername
Note that these commands are available only for containers created directly using the current fabric. They are not available for containers that were joined to the cluster manually.

References

For more details about the SSH container console commands, see the JBoss Fuse Console Reference.