General Information

To manage Charon-SSP and the emulated SPARC systems, you must connect to the Charon-SSP cloud instance with the Charon-SSP Manager. The Charon-SSP Manager is the main interface to all important functions of the Charon-SSP software.

Prerequisites:

The Charon-SSP Manager must be installed on your local system.
For access via the public IP address of the Charon host instance:
- The security configuration on your Charon host instance must at least allow SSH access. This allows the built-in SSH tunneling of the Charon-SSP Manger to work. Should you not use SSH tunneling, you must open up additional ports. However, if the connection runs over the Internet without a VPN, Stromasys strongly recommends to use SSH tunneling to protect your Charon-SSP cloud instance and any emulated systems running on it.
- You must have the public IP address of the Charon-SSP host instance in the cloud. To determine this address refer to the instance information displayed on the cloud management console.
- To use the Charon Manager integrated SSH tunnel, you need the private SSH key of the key-pair associated with your instance.
For access via an SSH-based VPN:
- Active SSH-based VPN (see SSH VPN - Connecting Charon Host and Guest to Customer Network)
- Private IP address of the Charon-SSP host in the VPN

Initial management password configuration: before connecting to the Charon-SSP host in the cloud with the Charon Manager for the first time after the initial installation you must set the management password. This can either be done via the command line (see SSH Command-Line Access) or via the Charon Manager as described below.

Starting the Charon Manager and Login to Charon Host

Starting the Charon Manager

To start the Charon-SSP Manager and to open the Charon Manager login window, log in on your Linux management system and use the following command:

$ /opt/charon-manager/ssp-manager/ssp-manager

The steps above will open the Charon Manager login window which has two tabs.

Entering Charon Manager Login Information and Connecting to Charon Host

Step 1: the Charon Manager Login tab

If the management password has not yet been set, perform the following steps:

Enter the public IP address of your Charon-SSP host instance in the IP address field.
Leave the Password field empty.
Enable the SSH tunnel configuration (select ON).
Change to the SSH tab to fill in the required information there.

If the management password has already been set, perform the following steps:

Enter the public IP address or the private VPN IP address of your Charon-SSP instance in the IP address field.
Enter the Charon-SSP management password.
Enable the SSH tunnel configuration for communication across a public network unless you use a secure VPN connection.
If the SSH tunnel is enabled, change to the SSH tab to fill in the required information there.

Step 2: the Charon Manager SSH tab

If you use the integrated SSH tunnel, perform the following steps:

Enter the Charon-SSP user (charon or sshuser) in the Username field.
Enter the path to the private key file (click on the three dots next to the Private key field to open a file browser). You associated your cloud instance with this key-pair during instance creation.
In rare cases, you may need to add the path to the public key on the local system.
Enter the passphrase for the private key if required.
Adjust the server port (default 22) if required.

The public key of the key-pair can copied from the .ssh/authorized_keys file of the sshuser of the instance.

Step 3: connecting to the Charon host system

After entering all the required information, click on Connect to connect to the Charon-SSP instance.

If the management password still needs to be set, you will receive a prompt to enter the new password:

Enter the desired password in the New password field and confirm it in the Confirm password field.
Then click on OK.
The login process continues.

Problem if the agent on target system is not running or unreachable:

If you receive an error similar to the one displayed in the screenshot below, verify that the host specified in the IP address field is correct and that access is not blocked by a firewall or security group. If the problem persists, connect to your instance via SSH, become the root user and restart the Charon Agent (# systemctl restart ssp-agentd).

Remember that the automatically assigned public IP address changes when the instance is restarted (this is different from a persistent Elastic IP address).

Charon-SSP Manager for AWS Overview

Charon Manager Main Functions Overview

The image below provides a first overview of the Charon Manager menus:

Other Options Provided by the Charon Manager

The Charon-SSP Manager virtual machine pane on the left has some additional functions applicable to all product variants:

Double-clicking on Home sorts the virtual machines alphabetically. Repeating the action toggles between ascending and descending sort order.
The position of a virtual machine in the list can be changed by manual drag-and-drop.
A right-click in the pane when no virtual machine is selected opens a context menu to create or import a virtual machine.