Files
firezone/rust/headless-client
Thomas Eizinger cecca37073 feat(gateway): allow exporting metrics to an OTEL collector (#9838)
As a first step in preparation for sending OTEL metrics from Clients and
Gateways to a cloud-hosted OTEL collector, we extend the CLI of the
Gateway with configuration options to provide a gRPC endpoint to an OTEL
collector.

If `FIREZONE_METRICS` is set to `otel-collector` and an endpoint is
configured via `OTLP_GRPC_ENDPOINT`, we will report our metrics to that
collector.

The future plan for extending this is such that if `FIREZONE_METRICS` is
set to `otel-collector` (which will likely be the default) and no
`OTLP_GRPC_ENDPOINT` is set, then we will use our own, hosted OTEL
collector and report metrics IF the `export-metrics` feature-flag is set
to `true`.

This is a similar integration as we have done it with streaming logs to
Sentry. We can therefore enable it on a similar granularity as we do
with the logs and e.g. only enable it for the `firezone` account to
start with.

In meantime, customers can already make use of those metrics if they'd
like by using the current integration.

Resolves: #1550
Related: #7419

---------

Co-authored-by: Antoine Labarussias <antoinelabarussias@gmail.com>
2025-07-14 03:54:38 +00:00
..
2025-07-05 08:18:14 +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=$(head -c 32 /dev/urandom | sha256sum | cut -d' ' -f1). The client requires this variable at startup. We recommend this to be a 64 character hex string.
  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.