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Deploy the Remote Access Service

Keyword: How do I deploy the SmartTouch Remote Access Service?

This tutorial group walks you through deploying the Remote Access Service — the SmartTouch component that brokers secure sessions between your team and IoT devices in the field. By the end, your dev environment will have a running Remote Access Service that can accept authenticated shell and diagnostics sessions to any connected device.

What you will learn

  • How to write a Service Spec Definition (SSD) that configures the remote access session broker, protocol support, and audit logging
  • How to build and push the Remote Access Service container image
  • How to verify the broker is active and ready to accept sessions

Key concepts

Remote Access Session — a secure, authenticated tunnel from the SmartTouch platform to a specific device. Sessions are scoped to a protocol (shell or diagnostics), role-gated, and have a configurable timeout.

Remote Access Agent — a lightweight daemon running on each device. It dials outbound to the Remote Access Service, so sessions work through NAT and firewalls without any port forwarding on the device network.

Session protocol — determines what the session tunnel carries. shell gives an interactive terminal. diagnostics streams read-only system metrics and logs. file-transfer allows secure upload and download of files.

Session audit log — a tamper-evident record of every session: who opened it, when, how long it lasted, and which device it connected to. Audit logs are retained for a configurable period and are queryable via stctl.

Tutorial sequence

Step Tutorial Time
1 Create the Remote Access Service SSD ~10 min
2 Build and push the Remote Access Service image ~15 min
3 Verify the session broker is running ~5 min

Total time: ~30 minutes

Prerequisites

Next steps after this group