Looking for ideas on using Incus for a homelab

[hi-ko (Heiko Robert)]

@simos

How do you get ZFS? Do you use Ubuntu or some other distribution?
Docker benefits from ZFS 2.2

on odroid I’m running Armbian 23 and had to compile the zfs module which is done implicitly when installing the kernel module

apt install -y zfsutils-linux zfs-dkms zfs-zed

which then installs:
zfs-2.1.9-2ubuntu1
zfs-kmod-2.1.9-2ubuntu1

On all the other systems I use Ubuntu 22.04.

@simos

@hi-ko

… it’s really great to just clone a snapshot in seconds and delete it after testing. This is even much easier and faster than before in vmware!

Do you do that (clone the snapshot and launch) through Incus UI or the CLI?
There’s opportunity here for some dedicated tool.

I’m doing everything in CLI although I also installed the incus-ui

@simos

My understanding is that a simplestreams service is currently available as part of Incus. There’s no standalone service though it likely should be easy to make one. Are you referring to tasks such as mirroring a remote? incus copy would copy specific images.

As far as I know incus can only consume simplestreams to be registered as a remote image repo. You could also expose your incus server and register that one as a remote on other systems but that is a bit too wide open, not simplestreams and not that easy to share.

I would like to prepare, configre, test the images in Incus instead of creating the image outside. Then exporting that image to be published on a simplestream server (e.g. nginx). The missing bits for the somehow broken workflow is how to automate

• splitting the exported image tarbal
• generate the json files required by the simplestreams protocol and
• publish all the artefacts to a public web server which may be secured by basic auth on artefact level

If we could configure incus in a way that a user having access to a specific project has only read access on the images, not being able to antything else that would be also fine. In that case we have to automate the way how to get external user certs trusted without manual interaction.

Goal is to allow people to maintain specific images having configured use cases and export that as a public image to be updated regularily. Maybe I’m on the wrong road and that kind of images should be build outside of incus using tools like distrobuilder? I like the way to create the “template” on a running system and automate cleanup and image build from that “master” system. That’s what we did in the past for OVAs when there are only 10-20 consumers but a lot work to test and maintain.