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Teleport
Machine ID Getting Started Guide
- Version 17.x
- Version 16.x
- Version 15.x
- Version 14.x
- Older Versions
In this getting started guide, you will configure Machine ID to issue certificates that enable a bot user to connect to a remote host.
Here's an overview of what you will do:
- Download and install
tbot
on the host that will run Machine ID. - Create a bot user.
- Start Machine ID.
- Use certificates issued by Machine ID to connect to a remote machine with SSH.
This guide covers configuring Machine ID for development and learning purposes. For a production-ready configuration of Machine ID, visit the Deploying Machine ID guides.
Prerequisites
- A host that you wish to assign an identity to using Machine ID.
-
A running Teleport cluster version 16.2.1 or above. If you want to get started with Teleport, sign up for a free trial or set up a demo environment.
-
The
tctl
admin tool andtsh
client tool.Visit Installation for instructions on downloading
tctl
andtsh
.
To check that you can connect to your Teleport cluster, sign in with tsh login
, then
verify that you can run tctl
commands using your current credentials.
For example:
tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=[email protected]tctl statusCluster teleport.example.com
Version 16.2.1
CA pin sha256:abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678
If you can connect to the cluster and run the tctl status
command, you can use your
current credentials to run subsequent tctl
commands from your workstation.
If you host your own Teleport cluster, you can also run tctl
commands on the computer that
hosts the Teleport Auth Service for full permissions.
Step 1/4. Download and install Teleport
In this step, you will be downloading and installing Teleport binaries onto the machine you wish to assign an identity to.
Each Teleport package hosted on our downloads page ships with several useful
binaries, including teleport
, tctl
, tsh
, and tbot
:
teleport
is the daemon used to initialize a Teleport cluster; this binary is not used in this guidetctl
is the administrative tool you will use to create the bot user (step 1/4)tsh
is the client tool you will use to log in to the Teleport Cluster (steps 2/4 and 4/4)tbot
is the Machine ID tool you will use to associate a bot user with a machine (step 3/4)
Download the appropriate Teleport package for your platform:
Install Teleport on your Linux server:
-
Assign edition to one of the following, depending on your Teleport edition:
Edition Value Teleport Enterprise Cloud cloud
Teleport Enterprise (Self-Hosted) enterprise
Teleport Community Edition oss
-
Get the version of Teleport to install. If you have automatic agent updates enabled in your cluster, query the latest Teleport version that is compatible with the updater:
TELEPORT_DOMAIN=example.teleport.comTELEPORT_VERSION="$(curl https://$TELEPORT_DOMAIN/v1/webapi/automaticupgrades/channel/default/version | sed 's/v//')"Otherwise, get the version of your Teleport cluster:
TELEPORT_DOMAIN=example.teleport.comTELEPORT_VERSION="$(curl https://$TELEPORT_DOMAIN/v1/webapi/ping | jq -r '.server_version')" -
Install Teleport on your Linux server:
curl https://cdn.teleport.dev/install-v16.2.1.sh | bash -s ${TELEPORT_VERSION} editionThe installation script detects the package manager on your Linux server and uses it to install Teleport binaries. To customize your installation, learn about the Teleport package repositories in the installation guide.
Step 2/4. Create a bot user
Before you create a bot user, you need to determine which role(s) you want to
assign to it. You can use the tctl
command below to examine what roles exist
on your system.
On your client machine, log in to Teleport using tsh
, then use tctl
to examine
what roles exist on your system.
Connect to the Teleport Auth Server and use tctl
to examine what roles exist on
your system.
tctl get roles --format=text
You will see something like the output below on a fresh install of Teleport with the
default roles—your cluster may have different roles. In this example, let's
assume you want to give the bot the access
role to allow it to connect to
machines within your cluster.
Role Allowed to login as Node Labels Access to resources
------- --------------------------------------------- ----------- ----------------------------------------
access {{internal.logins}} <all nodes> event:list,read,session:read,list
auditor no-login-6566121f-b602-47f1-a118-c9c618ee5aec session:list,read,event:list,read
editor user:list,create,read,update,delete,...
The internal.logins
trait is replaced with values from the Teleport local user
database. For full details on how traits work in Teleport roles, see the
Teleport Access Controls
Reference.
Machine ID can join with a token or the IAM Method on AWS.
Assuming that you are using the default access
role, ensure that you use the
--logins
flag when adding your bot to specify the SSH logins that you wish to
allow the bot to access on hosts. For our example, we will be using root
.
tctl bots add robot --roles=access --logins=root
First, create an IAM method token that specifies the AWS account from which
the bot can join. Create the below file as iam-token.yaml
then run tctl create -f iam-token.yaml
.
kind: token
version: v2
metadata:
# The token name is not a secret because instances must prove that they are
# running in your AWS account to use this token.
name: iam-token
spec:
# Only allow bots to join using this token.
roles: [Bot]
# Set the join method to be IAM.
join_method: iam
# Define the name of the bot that will be allowed to use this token.
bot_name: robot
allow:
# Restrict the AWS account and (optionally) ARN that can use this token.
# This information can be obtained from running the
# "aws sts get-caller-identity" command from the CLI.
- aws_account: "111111111111"
aws_arn: "arn:aws:sts::111111111111:assumed-role/teleport-bot-role/i-*"
Next, create the bot user.
$ tctl bots add robot --token=iam-token --roles=access --logins=root
Step 3/4. Start Machine ID
Now start Machine ID using the tbot
binary. The tbot start
command will
start running Machine ID in a loop, writing renewable certificates to
/var/lib/teleport/bot
and the short-lived certificates your application will
use to /opt/machine-id
.
In a production environment you will want to run Machine ID in the background using a service manager like systemd. However, in this guide you will run it in the foreground to better understand how it works.
export TELEPORT_ANONYMOUS_TELEMETRY=1sudo tbot start \ --data-dir=/var/lib/teleport/bot \ --destination-dir=/opt/machine-id \ --token=abcd123-insecure-do-not-use-this \ --join-method=token \ --proxy-server=example.teleport.sh:443
export TELEPORT_ANONYMOUS_TELEMETRY=1sudo tbot start \ --data-dir=/var/lib/teleport/bot \ --destination-dir=/opt/machine-id \ --token=iam-token \ --join-method=iam \ --proxy-server=example.teleport.sh:443
TELEPORT_ANONYMOUS_TELEMETRY
enables the submission of anonymous usage
telemetry. This helps us shape the future development of tbot
. You can disable
this by omitting this.
Replace the following fields with values from your own cluster.
token
is the token output by thetctl bots add
command or the name of your IAM method token.destination-dir
is where Machine ID writes user certificates that can be used by applications and tools.data-dir
is where Machine ID writes its private data, including its own short-lived renewable certificates. These should not be used by applications and tools.auth-server
is the address of your Teleport Cloud Proxy Server, for exampleexample.teleport.sh:443
.
token
is the token output by thetctl bots add
command or the name of your IAM method token.ca-pin
is the CA Pin for your Teleport cluster, and is output by thetctl bots add
command.destination-dir
is where Machine ID writes user certificates that can be used by applications and tools.data-dir
is where Machine ID writes its private data, including its own short-lived renewable certificates. These should not be used by applications and tools.auth-server
is typically the address of your Teleport Proxy Server (teleport.example.com:443
), but can also be the address of the Auth Server is direct connectivity is available.teleport.example.com:443
.
Now that Machine ID has successfully started, let's investigate the
/opt/machine-id
directory to see what was written to disk.
tree /opt/machine-idmachine-id├── identity├── key├── key-cert.pub├── key.pub├── known_hosts├── ssh_config├── teleport-database-ca.crt├── teleport-host-ca.crt├── teleport-user-ca.crt└── tlscert
0 directories, 10 files
This directory contains private key material in the key.*
files, SSH
certificates in the identity
file, X.509 certificates in the tls*
and
*.crt
files, OpenSSH configuration in the ssh_config
and
known_hosts
files to make it easy to integrate Machine ID with external
applications and tools.
Step 4/4. Use certificates issued by Machine ID
To use Machine ID, find a host that you want to connect to within your cluster
using tsh ls
. You might see output like the following on your system.
tsh lsNode Name Address Labels--------- -------------- -----------------------------node-name 127.0.0.1:3022 arch=x86_64,group=api-servers
When Teleport's Auth Service receives a request to list Teleport Nodes (e.g., to
display Nodes in the Web UI or via tsh ls
), it only returns the Nodes that the
current user is authorized to view.
For each Node in the user's Teleport cluster, the Auth Service applies the following checks in order and, if one check fails, hides the Node from the user:
- None of the user's roles contain a
deny
rule that matches the Node's labels. - At least one of the user's roles contains an
allow
rule that matches the Node's labels.
If you are not seeing Nodes when expected, make sure that your user's roles
include the appropriate allow
and deny
rules as documented in the
Teleport Access Controls Reference.
To use Machine ID with the OpenSSH integration, run the following command to
connect to node-name
within cluster example.com
.
ssh -F /opt/machine-id/ssh_config [email protected]
In addition to the ssh
client you can use tsh
. Replace the --proxy
parameter
with your proxy address.
tsh ssh --proxy=teleport.example.com -i /opt/machine-id/identity root@node-name
tsh ssh --proxy=mytenant.teleport.sh -i /opt/machine-id/identity root@node-name
The below error can occur when the bot does not have permission to log in to a node as the requested user:
ssh -F /opt/machine-id/ssh_config [email protected]root@node-name: Permission denied (publickey).kex_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host
This can happen in two circumstances:
- The user you are trying to log in as is not specified under
logins
in the role you are using - If you have used
--logins
when creating the bot user, the role the bot is impersonating does not have the{{ internal.logins }}
variable specified.
If you have been following along with the access
role, do the following.
- Export the role by running
tctl get roles/access > access.yaml
- Edit the
logins
field inaccess.yaml
- Update the role by running
tctl create -f access.yaml
Now you can replace any invocations of ssh
with the above command to provide
your applications and tools a machine identity that can be rotated, audited,
and controlled with all the familiar Teleport access controls.
Next Steps
- Read the architecture overview to learn about how Machine ID works in more detail.
- Check out the deployment guides to learn about
configuring
tbot
in a production-ready way for your platform. - Check out the access guides to learn about configuring
tbot
for different use cases than SSH. - Read the configuration reference to explore all the available configuration options.
- More information about
TELEPORT_ANONYMOUS_TELEMETRY
.