How To Connect An Internal Instance To A Production Instance

On the Discovery network, NVMe VPS Servers can be connected to internal instances. An Internal instance is isolated on the internal network. This makes an internal instance great to store things like databases on. We’re going to connect a database server to our Discovery instance. For the purposes of this guide, our database server won’t have an actual database on it. We’re just going to focus on connecting an internal instance to a production instance. This process is mostly the same as connecting two NVMe VPS together over the internal network. The only difference here is that your internal instance does not have a public IPv4.

Pre-Flight Check

You should already have an Instance with a public IPv4 address. Next, request an internal IP from the Discovery control panel.

Click Network
+ Create Private Network

Next, you will then be assigned a private IP. You can reboot your instance to automatically install your internal IP. To configure your private IP manually see the next section.

Configure Private IP Address

In the above image, we have been assigned the internal IP 10.10.10.102. We need to create an interface for this IP. Create the following file and copy the code to the file. Replace our internal Ip with yours.

nano /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1

BOOTPROTO=none
DEFROUTE=yes
DEVICE=eth1
GATEWAY=10.10.10.1
HWADDR=8e:68:3c:2c:8c:1b
IPADDR=10.10.10.102
NETMASK=255.0.0.0
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
USERCTL=no

If you have made changes to the networking above. Then reboot your server. You should already have an internal instance. If you don’t order one from https://account.first2host.co.uk/cart.php?gid=addons.

Install SSH In Internal Instance

Next, it’s time to install the services that you require inside your internal instance. Internal instances have outgoing internet access but no access to port 25. So, use the NoVNC console in the Discovery control panel to install the services that you require. We have just installed SSH so we can connect to our internal instance from our production instance.

Connect To Your Internal Server

So now, assuming that your firewall is disabled, you can now connect to your internal instance. So, from the command line in your production server issue the ssh command. Replace the below command with your internal IP. Ours is 10.10.10.103. Login with the root details to your internal instance.

ssh 10.10.10.3

So we have now connected a production server with an IPv4 for Public and Internal access to an Internal server. If on our internal server we had set up MySQL and added a database for something like WordPress, we could now tell WordPress our MySQL server was located at 10.10.10.103. Your database would be fully isolated from the internet.

For more Discovery how-to guides see the Instance Management section.