MSTR Web development over SOCKS proxy and AWS SSM
The problem: You want to work on MicroStrategy (MSTR) Web customizations in your local Eclipse/Tomcat environment, but you don’t have connectivity to your I-server. Your I-server lives in AWS, your corporate network blocks outbound port 22 access, and you don’t have a VPN or direct connect.
Solution: I had previously talked about AWS’s new SSH over SSM feature.
You can do port forwarding over this like any other SSH connection.
The catch with MSTR development is that, because of MSTR’s old-school approach to clustering, MSTR will attempt to connect to multiple
cluster nodes on the same port (34952 by default). In other words, if you forward with something like -L 34952:Iserver:34952, and tell
MSTR Web that your I-server is “localhost”, it will still try to connect to two different hostnames after establishing the initial
connection.
One workaround I came up with is to use a SOCKS proxy, which is like a mini-VPN inside SSH. A process using the SOCKS proxy will use the proxy for all TCP connections, so MSTR Web can access the actual IP addresses for each indiviudal I-server in the cluster. Instead of forwarding an individual port via localhost, you use the actual IP addresses.
General steps for setting this up:
ssh -D 7777 [ec2 instance ID]will establish a SOCKS proxy on localhost:7777 with the SSH connection- edit your
/etc/hostsfile to resolve your I-server hostnames to their actual IP addresses (EC2 private IPs) - add
-DsocksProxyHost=localhost -DsocksProxyPort=7777to your Tomcat JVM options.
Note that DNS requests do not go through SOCKS. Editing /etc/hosts is a workaround for that. Be mindful of hostnames that might resolve
differently in your corporate network vs. the internet/EC2.