Firewall

Opencast relies on a lot of network communication and although not strictly necessary, it usually makes sense to configure a firewall for additional protection

This describes a lot of the communication happening between servers in the most common use cases. In certain set-ups and with certain types of integrations, these may deviate slightly.

General rules are:

Users communicate with Opencast via HTTP(S)
Capture agents communicate with Opencast via HTTP(S)
Opencast nodes communicate among each other via HTTP(S)
Often OpenSearch runs on the admin node since this node communicates with these services exclusively
All servers should get access to the storage infrastructure
All Opencast nodes need database access

A visual representation of the communication within a three-node cluster will look like this:

graph LR user(User) -->|80, 443| oc1(Opencast Admin) user -.->|80, 443| oc2(Opencast Worker) user -->|80, 443| oc3(Opencast Presentation) oc1 <-->|80, 443| oc2 oc2 <-->|80, 443| oc3 oc3 <-->|80, 443| oc1 oc1 -->|e.g. 3306| db(Database) oc2 -->|e.g. 3306| db oc3 -->|e.g. 3306| db oc1 -->|9200| os(OpenSearch) oc1 --> storage(Storage) oc2 --> storage oc3 --> storage ca(Capture Agent) -->|80, 443| oc1

Notes:

The numbers in the diagram describe TCP ports
Communication between users and workers is often not necessary
If you use a database other than MariaDB, the port may differ

Suggested Firewall Configurations

Note that none of these instructions take additional services like SSH into account. They are focused just on what Opencast needs for communication.

Simple

For a very simple configuration catching most of the important attack vectors, implement the following firewall rules:

Allow HTTP and HTTPS to all Opencast nodes from the outside
Allow all TCP communication within the cluster

Complex

If you want a more complex, stricter set of rules:

Allow external HTTP and HTTPS communication to admin, presentation and possibly ingest
Allow all Opencast nodes to access the database
Allow the admin node to access OpenSearch
Allow all nodes access to the storage infrastructure