The LXD tutorials of Simos

simos · February 15, 2018, 12:46pm

I am in the process of updating these tutorials as they are largely obsolete.
In each updated tutorial I am focusing on Incus.

Old post starts below:

In this post I keep an index of the tutorials I have written on LXD at https://blog.simos.info/

Introduction to LXD

How to use LXD on xyz VPS or hosting service

Using LXD

How to run GUI applications on LXD

How to contribute to the development of LXD

Tutorial ideas

How to do network forwarding between the host and the containers. Use iptables. Use proxy device in lxd-2.21-next. DONE
a (resumable) desktop session in the cloud A rewrite of the X2Go to focus on the desktop session. DONE
Third tutorial on getting LAN IP addresses to the containers, using router static routes.
Linode disk repartitioning for ZFS.
Moving containers between pools (how to do with LXD 2 and LXD 3).

ahm-linuxcontainers · February 16, 2018, 8:34am

Very much appreciated!

simos · February 16, 2018, 1:49pm

Thanks!

I also take requests for tutorials. If you see something missing but would be useful to have, feel free to propose it.

ahm-linuxcontainers · February 19, 2018, 2:10pm

OK, here goes.

How to access containers from your network, without the bridging techniques covered in the other guides.

I think I’m asking for a guide to using iptables to forward incoming traffic to a port on a container. I’ve seen plenty of general guides for this, and old ones which talk about lxc, but something specific to this problem when using the latest lxd, would be great. Alternatively, have I missed this in the lxd docs or getting started guides?

bmullan · February 19, 2018, 2:45pm

Maybe this will help you…

https://github.com/jorgeluiztaioque/lxd-forward

simos · February 19, 2018, 4:47pm

The current version of LXD is 2.21. There is a patch that was accepted at https://github.com/lxc/lxd/issues/2504
and should make it in LXD 2.22 (or is it 3.0?).
It adds the functionality of a new device, the proxy device that currently can do TCP forwarding (UDP planned for the future).

It looks like this,

lxc config device add xen1 proxy0 proxy listen=tcp:192.168.50.196:80 connect=tcp:10.0.10.88:80 bind=host

Therefore, once the new version of LXD is released, I plan to write a post about the proxy device. Then add some backup info that UDP and Unix sockets are pending work, and people can use iptables for those cases.

@bmullan thanks for the https://github.com/jorgeluiztaioque/lxd-forward link. This makes it better for new users to be able to list, create, and delete iptables commands. I’ll add this as well.

angristan · February 19, 2018, 9:39pm

Thanks for your blog posts @simos! They are very interesting.

simos · February 20, 2018, 12:19am

Thanks @angristan!

I have added a new post on how to run TeamViewer on LXD.
In this post we learn about lxc console. TeamViewer is a bit peculiar and unfamiliar of the LXD confinement. You get many errors, and lxc console looks like a good compromise to get it to run.
Here is the link, https://blog.simos.info/how-to-run-teamviewer-in-lxd/

simos · February 21, 2018, 10:35am

A new tutorial on how to repartition the disk of a Hetzner VPS so that you make space for a partition to put ZFS in there for LXD,
https://blog.simos.info/how-to-repartition-a-hetzner-vps-disk-for-zfs-on-its-own-partition-for-lxd/

simos · March 26, 2018, 5:34pm

Added tutorial https://blog.simos.info/how-to-try-lxd-3-0-beta/

It is a gentle introduction on how to switch now to using LXD 3.0 beta, as provided by the snap package.
It takes the necessary time to explain some core snap concepts.
There is a troubleshooting section as well.

I do not know how bad it would be to downgrade from LXD 3.0 to LXD 2.0.

simos · May 11, 2018, 1:18pm

Added the post
https://blog.simos.info/a-closer-look-at-chrome-os-using-lxd-to-run-linux-gui-apps-project-crostini/

Chrome OS can now run Linux apps, and it uses a machine container to host a Linux distro.
In this post we see how these work, and how Google’s container looks like.

simos · June 14, 2018, 6:35pm

Added a post on how to setup the host on Ubuntu 18.04 so that you can do

ping mycontainer.lxd

simos · June 25, 2018, 8:02pm

Added updated tutorial on how to run GUI applications in a LXD container.
This version uses LXD profiles, so it is a joy to setup the system to run GUI applications.

I have tested

the host running either Ubuntu 16.04 or Ubuntu 18.04
the containers running either 12.04, 14.04, 16.04 or 18.04.

Enjoy!

simos · June 28, 2018, 3:48pm

Added a tutorial on how to do the HelloWorld with radare2/Cutter.
radare2 is a reversing framework and Cutter is the GUI.
I use a LXD GUI container to compile Cutter and run from there.

simos · July 11, 2018, 9:54am

Added a post on Minimal Ubuntu. These are container images that are smaller than the standard Ubuntu container images. They are about half the size of the standard images.

To use Minimal Ubuntu images in LXD,

Add the following remote,

lxc remote add --protocol simplestreams ubuntu-minimal https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/minimal/releases/

Launch images with Minimal Ubuntu like this:

lxc launch ubuntu-minimal:18.04 mycontainer

Just a reminder on how to launch the standard Ubuntu images,
```
lxc launch ubuntu:18.04 mycontainer
```

Read the blog post to find the differences between the two.

simos · July 23, 2018, 4:37pm

Added tutorial on how to configure LXD so that the containers can get directly a public IP address each.
This tutorial uses macvlan and configures statically the IP address in the container.

An alternative would be to use a bridge.

Yet another alternative would be to use IP aliases on the host to grab the IP address, then iptables to redirect network connections to the appropriate container.

simos · September 6, 2018, 8:27am

Added the following tutorial,

It talks about sharing the Unix socket of LXD into one of the containers of that LXD installation. In this way, it is possible to manage LXD from within a container. The sharing of LXD’s Unix socket is done using the proxy device for Unix socket <-> Unix socket proxying. Requires LXD 3.4 or newer (i.e. the LXD snap).

simos · September 13, 2018, 7:01pm

Added a tutorial on how to run a Jupyter Notebook for the Julia computer language, in a LXD container,

In terms of LXD, it shows how to create a proxy device for TCP. It also demonstrates the difference between listening to localhost and listening to 0.0.0.0.

simos · September 28, 2018, 12:39pm

Added two more tutorials on developing on a ESP32 board and having the whole development environment inside LXD containers.

In terms of LXD features, these tutorials demonstrate the use of the unix-char device to share the /dev/ttyUSB0 character device of the host to the container. There is nice hot-plugging going on, which means it’s easy to connect and disconnect the ESP32 without much trouble in the LXD container.

The first tutorial is about using the command-line ESP-IDE development environment in a LXD container,

The second tutorial is about setting the Android IDE in a LXD container,

It has been great going through the process. I wish to see some feedback to evaluate if it is interesting to continue doing such tutorials (compared to core LXD tutorials).

stgraber · September 28, 2018, 12:49pm

One thought on serial devices, it’s usually best to use /dev/serial/by-id/ rather than /dev/ttyUSBX as the former will remain stable over reboots when you have more than one USB serial device connected.