How to use Kobiton devices to test internal web/apps

January 25, 2021 13:57

You have websites or services that are behind a firewall and you want to use Kobiton devices to access these websites or services.

Solution

There are 2 ways for Kobiton devices to access internal websites or services.

1. Whitelist the IP address for Kobiton devices

All Public & Private Kobiton devices connect to the internet via public IPs:

173.213.234.253
64.19.222.131

All Proof Of Concept (POC) Kobiton devices connect to the internet via public IP:

173.213.234.253

You can configure your firewall to enable incoming traffic from these IPs and route it to your internal websites or services.

Below is a possible workflow to configure the network:

Request a public static IP from your network provider, e.g. 175.5.5.10.
Configure the firewall to route traffic from 175.5.5.10 to the website or service in question if it originated from 173.213.234.253 (Kobiton devices)
(Optional) If you have a domain (e.g. mycompany.com), you can create a sub-domain for your internal site. Just create an A record on DNS (e.g. mysite.mycompany.com) and map it to the public static IP (e.g. 175.5.5.10).

If you have multiple websites or services, request multiple static IPs and add more routing entries to the firewall as shown in step 2 above.

After completing the above steps, Kobiton devices will be able to access an internal website or service via the corresponding IP address or domain.

2. Setup a tunnel to your local machine

You can use any tunneling service to temporarily establish a public tunnel into your machine. Once that tunnel is created, you can access your websites or services on Kobiton devices by using the public domain names generated by the tunneling service. Below are some popular services:

Note

The above third-party services are not related to Kobiton in anyway. Please use them at your own discretion. * If the websites or services don't run on your machine, try changing the hostname of the websites and services to the public domain names generated by the tunneling service, then run a lightweight reverse proxy locally to forward traffic from the public tunnel to the internal websites and services. Below is a simple configuration to setup Nginx as a reverse proxy.

# These are default Nginx settings from nginx
worker_processes 1;
daemon off;
events {
  worker_connections 1012;
}
http {
  server {
    # This is the port in your machine that proxied requests from tunneling service go to 
    listen 8000;

    server_name localhost; 

    # Proxy requests from tunneling service to internal websites / services
    location / {
      # The hostname of your internal websites / services should be renamed
      # to the generated public domain from the tunneling service
      # If you use ngrok.com, you see something like "ebe01685.ngrok.io"
      proxy_pass http://ebe01685.ngrok.io;
    }
  }
}