I've setup neo4j on port 7474 on a Rackspace cloud server. I want to access this server from another Rackspace cloud server (appserver) but the connection is refused.
I've tried enabling access for the appserver to port 7474 on the neo4j server using ufw:
sudo ufw allow from 22.234.298.297 to any port 7474
I can see this rule when I run 'ufw staus' but it doesn't seem to make any difference when I try to connect to the appserver. I can ssh between these two servers.
How do I open port 7474 between cloud servers on Rackspace?
(my apologies for this very basic question but rackspace support are not helping and I cant find rackspace specific information on this)
Glad, we could solve the problem (see comments on the question).
It so happens that Neo4j accepts only connections from localhost per default. When trying to gain access to Neo4j via REST API from an app server within the same network, one has to configure the Neo4j server to open up.
The neo4j-server.properties configuration file has a configuration key with org.neo4j.server.webserver.address. You have a couple of options here.
For the first case, use the local ip address of the machine where Neo4j is running. Let's say your machines are connected via a private class C network. The machine with Neo4j has an ip 192.168.1.4 - that's the ip you want to enter as the value in org.neo4j.server.webserver.address, so your app server running in the same network with maybe an ip of 192.168.1.5 can make network requests that are being answered by the Neo4j web server.
For the second case, you enter 0.0.0.0 as value for org.neo4j.server.webserver.address to denote that you want to accept connections on all available ip addresses on that machine. In that case you want to set up your firewall to handle permissions who can talk to the server and who doesn't - even with authentication enabled.
Extra In a production environment that requires high availability, one can use Neo4j's enterprise edition with a high availability cluster in a master-slave setting. I've used in with one master and two slaves. I configured the Neo4j servers that they can only be accessed from the proxy server that routes writing cypher queries to the master, and reading queries to the slaves. The proxy itself had a hardware firewall on it to ensure only specific app servers within the network have access to the Neo4j database.