Category Archives: Planet Ubuntu

Getting started with LXD – the container lightervisor

Posted on 2015/04/21 by Stéphane Graber

Introduction

For the past 6 months, Serge Hallyn, Tycho Andersen, Chuck Short, Ryan Harper and myself have been very busy working on a new container project called LXD.

Ubuntu 15.04, due to be released this Thursday, will contain LXD 0.7 in its repository. This is still the early days and while we’re confident LXD 0.7 is functional and ready for users to experiment, we still have some work to do before it’s ready for critical production use.

LXD logo

So what’s LXD?

LXD is what we call our container “lightervisor”. The core of LXD is a daemon which offers a REST API to drive full system containers just like you’d drive virtual machines.

The LXD daemon runs on every container host and client tools then connect to those to manage those containers or to move or copy them to another LXD.

We provide two such clients:

  • A command line tool called “lxc”
  • An OpenStack Nova plugin called nova-compute-lxd

The former is mostly aimed at small deployments ranging from a single machine (your laptop) to a few dozen hosts. The latter seamlessly integrates inside your OpenStack infrastructure and lets you manage containers exactly like you would virtual machines.

Why LXD?

LXC has been around for about 7 years now, it evolved from a set of very limited tools which would get you something only marginally better than a chroot, all the way to the stable set of tools, stable library and active user and development community that we have today.

Over those years, a lot of extra security features were added to the Linux kernel and LXC grew support for all of them. As we saw the need for people to build their own solution on top of LXC, we’ve developed a public API and a set of bindings. And last year, we’ve put out our first long term support release which has been a great success so far.

That being said, for a while now, we’ve been wanting to do a few big changes:

  • Make LXC secure by default (rather than it being optional).
  • Completely rework the tools to make them simpler and less confusing to newcomers.
  • Rely on container images rather than using “templates” to build them locally.
  • Proper checkpoint/restore support (live migration).

Unfortunately, solving any of those means doing very drastic changes to LXC which would likely break our existing users or at least force them to rethink the way they do things.

Instead, LXD is our opportunity to start fresh. We’re keeping LXC as the great low level container manager that it is. And build LXD on top of it, using LXC’s API to do all the low level work. That achieves the best of both worlds, we keep our low level container manager with its API and bindings but skip using its tools and templates, instead replacing those by the new experience that LXD provides.

How does LXD relate to LXC, Docker, Rocket and other container projects?

LXD is currently based on top of LXC. It uses the stable LXC API to do all the container management behind the scene, adding the REST API on top and providing a much simpler, more consistent user experience.

The focus of LXD is on system containers. That is, a container which runs a clean copy of a Linux distribution or a full appliance. From a design perspective, LXD doesn’t care about what’s running in the container.

That’s very different from Docker or Rocket which are application container managers (as opposed to system container managers) and so focus on distributing apps as containers and so very much care about what runs inside the container.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with using LXD to run a bunch of full containers which then run Docker or Rocket inside of them to run their different applications. So letting LXD manage the host resources for you, applying all the security restrictions to make the container safe and then using whatever application distribution mechanism you want inside.

Getting started with LXD

The simplest way for somebody to try LXD is by using it with its command line tool. This can easily be done on your laptop or desktop machine.

On an Ubuntu 15.04 system (or by using ppa:ubuntu-lxc/lxd-stable on 14.04 or above), you can install LXD with:

sudo apt-get install lxd

Then either logout and login again to get your group membership refreshed, or use:

newgrp lxd

From that point on, you can interact with your newly installed LXD daemon.

The “lxc” command line tool lets you interact with one or multiple LXD daemons. By default it will interact with the local daemon, but you can easily add more of them.

As an easy way to start experimenting with remote servers, you can add our public LXD server at https://images.linuxcontainers.org:8443
That server is an image-only read-only server, so all you can do with it is list images, copy images from it or start containers from it.

You’ll have to do the following to: add the server, list all of its images and then start a container from one of them:

lxc remote add images images.linuxcontainers.org
lxc image list images:
lxc launch images:ubuntu/trusty/i386 ubuntu-32

What the above does is define a new “remote” called “images” which points to images.linuxcontainers.org. Then list all of its images and finally start a local container called “ubuntu-32” from the ubuntu/trusty/i386 image. The image will automatically be cached locally so that future containers are started instantly.

The “<remote name>:” syntax is used throughout the lxc client. When not specified, the default “local” remote is assumed. Should you only care about managing a remote server, the default remote can be changed with “lxc remote set-default”.

Now that you have a running container, you can check its status and IP information with:

lxc list

Or get even more details with:

lxc info ubuntu-32

To get a shell inside the container, or to run any other command that you want, you may do:

lxc exec ubuntu-32 /bin/bash

And you can also directly pull or push files from/to the container with:

lxc file pull ubuntu-32/path/to/file .
lxc file push /path/to/file ubuntu-32/

When done, you can stop or delete your container with one of those:

lxc stop ubuntu-32
lxc delete ubuntu-32

What’s next?

The above should be a reasonably comprehensive guide to how to use LXD on a single system. Of course, that’s not the most interesting thing to do with LXD. All the commands shown above can work against multiple hosts, containers can be remotely created, moved around, copied, …

LXD also supports live migration, snapshots, configuration profiles, device pass-through and more.

I intend to write some more posts to cover those use cases and features as well as highlight some of the work we’re currently busy doing.

LXD is a pretty young but very active project. We’ve had great contributions from existing LXC developers as well as newcomers.

The project is entirely developed in the open at https://github.com/lxc/lxd. We keep track of upcoming features and improvements through the project’s issue tracker, so it’s easy to see what will be coming soon. We also have a set of issues marked “Easy” which are meant for new contributors as easy ways to get to know the LXD code and contribute to the project.

LXD is an Apache2 licensed project, written in Go and which doesn’t require a CLA to contribute to (we do however require the standard DCO Signed-off-by). It can be built with both golang and gccgo and so works on almost all architectures.

Extra resources

More information can be found on the official LXD website:
https://linuxcontainers.org/lxd

The code, issues and pull requests can all be found on Github:
https://github.com/lxc/lxd

And a good overview of the LXD design and its API may be found in our specs:
https://github.com/lxc/lxd/tree/master/specs

Conclusion

LXD is a new and exciting project. It’s an amazing opportunity to think fresh about system containers and provide the best user experience possible, alongside great features and rock solid security.

With 7 releases and close to a thousand commits by 20 contributors, it’s a very active, fast paced project. Lots of things still remain to be implemented before we get to our 1.0 milestone release in early 2016 but looking at what was achieved in just 5 months, I’m confident we’ll have an incredible LXD in another 12 months!

For now, we’d welcome your feedback, so install LXD, play around with it, file bugs and let us know what’s important for you next.

Posted in Canonical voices, LXC, LXD, Planet Revolution-Linux, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | 40 Comments

VPN in containers

Posted on 2014/09/26 by Stéphane Graber

I often have to deal with VPNs, either to connect to the company network, my own network when I’m abroad or to various other places where I’ve got servers I manage.

All of those VPNs use OpenVPN, all with a similar configuration and unfortunately quite a lot of them with overlapping networks. That means that when I connect to them, parts of my own network are no longer reachable or it means that I can’t connect to more than one of them at once.

Those I suspect are all pretty common issues with VPN users, especially those working with or for companies who over the years ended up using most of the rfc1918 subnets.

So I thought, I’m working with containers every day, nowadays we have those cool namespaces in the kernel which let you run crazy things as a a regular user, including getting your own, empty network stack, so why not use that?

Well, that’s what I ended up doing and so far, that’s all done in less than 100 lines of good old POSIX shell script 🙂

That gives me, fully unprivileged non-overlapping VPNs! OpenVPN and everything else run as my own user and nobody other than the user spawning the container can possibly get access to the resources behind the VPN.

The code is available at: git clone git://github.com/stgraber/vpn-container

Then it’s as simple as: ./start-vpn VPN-NAME CONFIG

What happens next is the script will call socat to proxy the VPN TCP socket to a UNIX socket, then a user namespace, network namespace, mount namespace and uts namespace are all created for the container. Your user is root in that namespace and so can start openvpn and create network interfaces and routes. With careful use of some bind-mounts, resolvconf and byobu are also made to work so DNS resolution is functional and we can start byobu to easily allow as many shell as you want in there.

In the end it looks like this:

stgraber@dakara:~/vpn$ ./start-vpn stgraber.net ../stgraber-vpn/stgraber.conf 
WARN: could not reopen tty: No such file or directory
lxc: call to cgmanager_move_pid_abs_sync(name=systemd) failed: invalid request
Fri Sep 26 17:48:07 2014 OpenVPN 2.3.2 x86_64-pc-linux-gnu [SSL (OpenSSL)] [LZO] [EPOLL] [PKCS11] [eurephia] [MH] [IPv6] built on Feb  4 2014
Fri Sep 26 17:48:07 2014 WARNING: No server certificate verification method has been enabled.  See http://openvpn.net/howto.html#mitm for more info.
Fri Sep 26 17:48:07 2014 NOTE: the current --script-security setting may allow this configuration to call user-defined scripts
Fri Sep 26 17:48:07 2014 Attempting to establish TCP connection with [AF_INET]127.0.0.1:1194 [nonblock]
Fri Sep 26 17:48:07 2014 TCP connection established with [AF_INET]127.0.0.1:1194
Fri Sep 26 17:48:07 2014 TCPv4_CLIENT link local: [undef]
Fri Sep 26 17:48:07 2014 TCPv4_CLIENT link remote: [AF_INET]127.0.0.1:1194
Fri Sep 26 17:48:09 2014 [vorash.stgraber.org] Peer Connection Initiated with [AF_INET]127.0.0.1:1194
Fri Sep 26 17:48:12 2014 TUN/TAP device tun0 opened
Fri Sep 26 17:48:12 2014 Note: Cannot set tx queue length on tun0: Operation not permitted (errno=1)
Fri Sep 26 17:48:12 2014 do_ifconfig, tt->ipv6=1, tt->did_ifconfig_ipv6_setup=1
Fri Sep 26 17:48:12 2014 /sbin/ip link set dev tun0 up mtu 1500
Fri Sep 26 17:48:12 2014 /sbin/ip addr add dev tun0 172.16.35.50/24 broadcast 172.16.35.255
Fri Sep 26 17:48:12 2014 /sbin/ip -6 addr add 2001:470:b368:1035::50/64 dev tun0
Fri Sep 26 17:48:12 2014 /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf tun0 1500 1544 172.16.35.50 255.255.255.0 init
dhcp-option DNS 172.16.20.30
dhcp-option DNS 172.16.20.31
dhcp-option DNS 2001:470:b368:1020:216:3eff:fe24:5827
dhcp-option DNS nameserver
dhcp-option DOMAIN stgraber.net
Fri Sep 26 17:48:12 2014 add_route_ipv6(2607:f2c0:f00f:2700::/56 -> 2001:470:b368:1035::1 metric -1) dev tun0
Fri Sep 26 17:48:12 2014 add_route_ipv6(2001:470:714b::/48 -> 2001:470:b368:1035::1 metric -1) dev tun0
Fri Sep 26 17:48:12 2014 add_route_ipv6(2001:470:b368::/48 -> 2001:470:b368:1035::1 metric -1) dev tun0
Fri Sep 26 17:48:12 2014 add_route_ipv6(2001:470:b511::/48 -> 2001:470:b368:1035::1 metric -1) dev tun0
Fri Sep 26 17:48:12 2014 add_route_ipv6(2001:470:b512::/48 -> 2001:470:b368:1035::1 metric -1) dev tun0
Fri Sep 26 17:48:12 2014 Initialization Sequence Completed


To attach to this VPN, use: byobu -S /home/stgraber/vpn/stgraber.net.byobu
To kill this VPN, do: byobu -S /home/stgraber/vpn/stgraber.net.byobu kill-server
or from inside byobu: byobu kill-server

After that, just copy/paste the byobu command and you’ll get a shell inside the container. Don’t be alarmed by the fact that you’re root in there. root is mapped to your user’s uid and gid outside the container so it’s actually just your usual user but with a different name and with privileges against the resources owned by the container.

You can now use the VPN as you want without any possible overlap or conflict with any route or VPN you may be running on that system and with absolutely no possibility that a user sharing your machine may access your running VPN.

This has so far been tested with 5 different VPNs, on a regular Ubuntu 14.04 LTS system with all VPNs being TCP based. UDP based VPNs would probably just need a couple of tweaks to the socat unix-socket proxy.

Enjoy!

Posted in Canonical voices, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | 7 Comments

LXC 1.0 now available!

Posted on 2014/02/20 by Stéphane Graber

After 10 months of work, over a thousand contributions by 60 or so contributors, we’ve finally released LXC 1.0!

You may have followed my earlier series of blog post on LXC 1.0, well, everything I described in there is now available in a stable release which we intend to support for a long time.

In the immediate future, I expect most of LXC upstream will focus on dealing with the bug reports and questions which will no doubt follow this release, then we’ll have to discuss what our goals for LXC 1.1 are and setup a longer term roadmap to LXC 2.0.

But right now, I’m just happy to have LXC 1.0 out, get a lot more users to play with new technologies like unprivileged containers and play with our API in the various languages we support.

Thanks to everyone who made this possible!

Posted in Canonical voices, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | 3 Comments

LXC 1.0: Troubleshooting and debugging [10/10]

Posted on 2014/02/18 by Stéphane Graber

This is post 10 out of 10 in the LXC 1.0 blog post series.

Logging

Most LXC commands take two options:

  • -o, –logfile=FILE: Location of the logfile (defaults to stder)
  • -l, –logpriority=LEVEL: Log priority (defaults to ERROR)

The valid log priorities are:

  • FATAL
  • ALERT
  • CRIT
  • ERROR
  • WARN
  • NOTICE
  • INFO
  • DEBUG
  • TRACE

FATAL, ALERT and CRIT are mostly unused at this time, ERROR is pretty common and so are the others except for TRACE. If you want to see all possible log entries, set the log priority to TRACE.

There are also two matching configuration options which you can put in your container’s configuration:

  • lxc.logfile
  • lxc.loglevel

They behave exactly like their command like counterparts. However note that if the command line options are passed, any value set in the configuration will be ignored and instead will be overridden by those passed by the user.

When reporting a bug against LXC, it’s usually a good idea to attach a log of the container’s action with a logpriority of at least DEBUG.

API debugging

When debugging a problem using the API it’s often a good idea to try and re-implement the failing bit of code in C using liblxc directly, that helps get the binding out of the way and usually leads to cleaner stack traces and easier bug reports.

It’s also useful to set lxc.loglevel to DEBUG using set_config_item on your container so you can get a log of what LXC is doing.

Testing

Before digging to deep into an issue with the code you are working on, it’s usually a good idea to make sure that LXC itself is behaving as it should on your machine.

To check that, run “lxc-checkconfig” and look for any missing kernel feature, if all looks good, then install (or build) the tests. In Ubuntu, those are shipped in a separate “lxc-tests” package. Most of those tests are expecting to be run on an Ubuntu system (patches welcome…) but should do fine on any distro that’s compatible with the lxc-ubuntu template.

Run each of the lxc-test-* binaries as root and note any failure. Note that it’s possible that they leave some cruft behind on failure, if so, please cleanup any of those leftover containers before processing to the next test as unfortunately that cruft may cause failure by itself.

Reporting bugs

The primary LXC bug tracker is available at: https://github.com/lxc/lxc/issues

You may also report bugs directly through the distributions (though it’s often preferred to still file an upstream bug and then link the two), for example for Ubuntu, LXC bugs are tracked here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lxc

If you’ve already done some work tracking down the bug, you may also directly contact us on our mailing-list (see below).

Sending patches

We always welcome contributions and are very happy to have such an active development community around LXC (Over 60 people contributed to LXC 1.0). We don’t have many rules governing contributions, we just ask that your contributions be properly licensed and that you own the copyright on the code you are sending us (and indicate so by putting a Signed-off-by line in your commit).

As for the licensing, anything which ends up in the library (liblxc) or its bindings must be LGPLv2.1+ or compatible with it and not adding any additional restriction. Standalone binaries and scripts can either be LGLPv2.1+ (the project default) or GPLv2. If unsure, LGPLv2.1+ is usually a safe bet for any new file in LXC.

Patches may be sent using two different ways:

  • Inline to the lxc-devel@lists.linuxcontainers.org (using git send-email or similar)
  • Using a pull request on github (we will then grab the .patch URL and treat it as if they were e-mails sent to our list)

Getting in touch with us

The primary way of contacting the upstream LXC team is through our mailing-lists. We have two, one for LXC development and one for LXC users questions:

For more real-time discussion, you can also find a lot of LXC users and most of the developers in #lxcontainers on irc.freenode.net.

Final notes

So this is my final blog post before LXC 1.0 is finally released. We’re currently at rc3 with an rc4 coming a bit later today and a final release scheduled for tomorrow evening or Thursday morning.

I hope you have enjoyed this blog post series and that it’ll be a useful reference for people deploying LXC 1.0.

Posted in Canonical voices, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | 10 Comments

Your own Ubuntu Touch image server

Posted on 2014/02/11 by Stéphane Graber

Ubuntu Touch images

For those not yet familiar with this, Ubuntu Touch systems are setup using a read-only root filesystem on top of which writable paths are mounted using bind-mounts from persistent or ephemeral storage.

The default update mechanism is therefore image based. We build new images on our build infrastructure, generate diffs between images and publish the result on the public server.

Each image is made of a bunch of xz compreseed tarballs, the actual number of tarballs may vary, so can their name. At the end of the line, the upgrader simply mounts the partitions and unpacks the tarball in the order it’s given them. It has a list of files to remove and the rest of the files are simply unpacked on top of the existing system.

Delta images only contain the files that are different from the previous image, full images contain them all. Partition images are stored in binary format in a partitions/ directory which the upgrader checks and flashes automatically.

The current list of tarballs we tend to use for the official images are:

  • ubuntu: Ubuntu root filesystem (common to all devices)
  • device: Device specific data (partition images and Android image)
  • custom: Customization tarball (applied on top of the root filesystem in /custom)
  • version: Channel/device/build metadata

For more details on how this all works, I’d recommend reading our wiki pages which act as the go-to specification for the server, clients and upgrader.

Running a server

There are a lot of reasons why you may want to run your own system-image server but the main ones seem to be:

  • Supporting your own Ubuntu Touch port with over-the-air updates
  • Publishing your own customized version of an official image
  • QA infrastructure for Ubuntu Touch images
  • Using it as an internal buffer/mirror for your devices

Up until now, doing this was pretty tricky as there wasn’t an easy way to import files from the public system-image server into a local one nor was there a simple way to replace the official GPG keys by your own (which would result in your updates to be considered invalid).

This was finally resolved on Friday when I landed the code for a few new file generators in the main system-image server branch.

It’s now reasonably easy to setup your own server, have it mirror some bits from the main public server, swap GPG keys and include your local tarballs.

Before I start with step by step instructions, please note that due to bug 1278589, you need a valid SSL certificate (https) on your server. This may be a problem to some porters who don’t have a separate IP for their server or can’t afford an SSL certificate. We plan on having this resolved in the system-image client soon.

Installing your server

Those instructions have been tried on a clean Ubuntu 13.10 cloud instance, it assumes that you are running them as an “ubuntu” user with “/home/ubuntu” as its home directory.

Install some required packages:

sudo apt-get install -y bzr abootimg android-tools-fsutils 
    python-gnupg fakeroot pxz pep8 pyflakes python-mock apache2

You’ll need a fair amount of available entropy to generate all the keys used by the test suite and production server. If you are doing this for testing only and don’t care much about getting strong keys, you may want to install “haveged” too.

Then setup the web server:

sudo adduser $USER www-data
sudo chgrp www-data /var/www/
sudo chmod g+rwX /var/www/
sudo rm -f /var/www/index.html
newgroups www-data

That being done, now let’s grab the server code, generate some keys and run the testsuite:

bzr branch lp:~ubuntu-system-image/ubuntu-system-image/server system-image
cd system-image
tests/generate-keys
tests/run
cp -R tests/keys/*/ secret/gpg/keys/
bin/generate-keyrings

Now all you need is some configuration. We’ll define a single “test” channel which will contain a single device “mako” (nexus4). It’ll mirror both the ubuntu and device tarball from the main public server (using the trusty-proposed channel over there), repack the device tarball to swap the GPG keys, then download a customization tarball from an http server, stack a keyring tarball (overriding the keys in the ubuntu tarball) and finally generating a version tarball. This channel will contain up to 15 images and will start at image ID “1”.

Doing all this can be done with that bit of configuration (you’ll need to change your server’s FQDN accordingly) in etc/config:

[global]
base_path = /home/ubuntu/system-image/
channels = test
gpg_key_path = secret/gpg/keys/
gpg_keyring_path = secret/gpg/keyrings/
publish_path = /var/www/
state_path = state/
public_fqdn = system-image.test.com
public_http_port = 80
public_https_port = 443

[channel_test]
type = auto
versionbase = 1
fullcount = 15
files = ubuntu, device, custom-savilerow, keyring, version
file_ubuntu = remote-system-image;https://system-image.ubuntu.com;trusty-proposed;ubuntu
file_device = remote-system-image;https://system-image.ubuntu.com;trusty-proposed;device;keyring=archive-master
file_custom-savilerow = http;https://jenkins.qa.ubuntu.com/job/savilerow-trusty/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/build/custom.tar.xz;name=custom-savilerow,monitor=https://jenkins.qa.ubuntu.com/job/savilerow-trusty/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/build/build_number
file_keyring = keyring;archive-master
file_version = version

Lastly we need to actual create the channel and device in the server, this is done by calling “bin/si-shell” and then doing:

pub.create_channel("test")
pub.create_device("test", "mako")
for keyring in ("archive-master", "image-master", "image-signing", "blacklist"):
    pub.publish_keyring(keyring)

And that’s it! Your server is now ready to use.
To generate your first image, simply run “bin/import-images”.
This will take a while as it’ll need to download files from those external servers, repack some bits but once it’s done, you’ll have a new image published.

You’ll probably want to run that command from cron every few minutes so that whenever any of the referenced files change a new image is generated and published (deltas will also be automatically generated).

To look at the result of the above, I have setup a server here: https://phablet.stgraber.org

To use that server, you’d flash using: phablet-flash ubuntu-system –alternate-server phablet.stgraber.org –channel test

Posted in Canonical voices, Planet Ubuntu, Ubuntu Touch | Tagged | 5 Comments