Client vm tooling

Spinning up separate jump hosts to maintain connectivity to multiple environment(s) simultaneously is beneficial, but this method presents its own challenges.

Challenge

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We must now maintain configurations, security updates, and patches for the operating system and our engineer toolsets on each jump host (which may need to be tidied or wiped after project completion).​

  • SecureCRT / MobaXterm Sessions​
  • Password storage​
  • Browser bookmarks​
  • Etc.​

Solution

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Going further, we can create generic jump hosts instead...​

  • Jump1, Jump2, and Jump3 VMs are generic jump hosts, all having the same subset of VPN clients installed.
  • Each jump host will only need to be configured with VPN access to client environments; i.e. no engineering toolsets.

Now each jump host can connect to any client environment as necessary. We'll then use them as SSH tunnels (for SSH sessions) and as SOCKS5 proxies (for web GUI access) to access that client's resources. This allows us to use our entire, familiar toolset that we have installed on our engineer laptop.