Files
firezone/rust/headless-client
Thomas Eizinger 39e272cfd1 refactor(rust): introduce dns-types crate (#8380)
A sizeable chunk of Firezone's Rust components deal with parsing,
manipulating and emitting DNS queries and responses. The API surface of
DNS is quite large and to make handling of all corner-cases easier, we
depend on the `domain` library to do the heavy-lifting for us.

For better or worse, `domain` follows a lazy-parsing approach. Thus,
creating a new DNS message doesn't actually verify that it is in fact
valid. Within Firezone, we make several assumptions around DNS messages,
such as that they will only ever contain a single question.
Historically, DNS allows for multiple questions per query but in
practise, nobody uses that.

Due to how we handle DNS in Firezone, manipulating these messages
happens in multiple places. That combined with the lazy-parsing approach
from `domain` warrants having our own `dns-types` library that wraps
`domain` and provides us with types that offer the interface we need in
the rest of the codebase.

Resolves: #7019
2025-03-10 04:33:10 +00:00
..

headless-client

This crate acts as the CLI / headless Client, and the privileged tunnel service for the GUI Client, for both Linux and Windows.

It is built as:

  • headless-client to act as the Linux / Windows headless Client
  • firezone-headless-client to act as the Linux tunnel service, Windows headless Client, or Windows tunnel service

In general, the brand name should be part of the file name, but the OS name should not be.

Running

To run the headless Client:

  1. Generate a new Service account token from the "Actors -> Service Accounts" section of the admin portal and save it in your secrets manager. The Firezone Linux client requires a service account at this time.
  2. Ensure /etc/dev.firezone.client/token is only readable by root (i.e. chmod 400)
  3. Ensure /etc/dev.firezone.client/token contains the Service account token. The Client needs this before it can start
  4. Set FIREZONE_ID to a unique string to identify this client in the portal, e.g. export FIREZONE_ID=$(uuidgen). The client requires this variable at startup.
  5. Set LOG_DIR to a suitable directory for writing logs
    export LOG_DIR=/tmp/firezone-logs
    mkdir $LOG_DIR
    
  6. Now, you can start the client with:
./firezone-headless-client standalone

If you're running as an unprivileged user, you'll need the CAP_NET_ADMIN capability to open /dev/net/tun. You can add this to the client binary with:

sudo setcap 'cap_net_admin+eip' /path/to/firezone-headless-client

Building

Assuming you have Rust installed, you can build the headless Client with:

cargo build --release -p firezone-headless-client

The binary will be in target/release/firezone-headless-client

The release on Github are built with musl. To build this way, use:

rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
sudo apt-get install musl-tools
cargo build --release -p headless-client --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

Files

  • /etc/dev.firezone.client/token - The service account token, provided by the human administrator. Must be owned by root and have 600 permissions (r/w by owner, nobody else can read) If present, the tunnel will ignore any GUI Client and run as a headless Client. If absent, the tunnel will wait for commands from a GUI Client
  • /usr/bin/firezone-headless-client - The tunnel binary. This must run as root so it can modify the system's DNS settings. If DNS is not needed, it only needs CAP_NET_ADMIN.
  • /usr/lib/systemd/system/firezone-headless-client.service - A systemd service unit, installed by the deb package.
  • /var/lib/dev.firezone.client/config/firezone-id - The device ID, unique across an organization. The tunnel will generate this if it's not present.