What are LXCs?
Containers are a lightweight virtualization technology. They are more akin to an enhanced chroot than to full virtualization like Qemu or VMware, both because they do not emulate hardware and because containers share the same operating system as the host.
Installing lxc
First of all, you have to install lxc and its dependencies. So, go ahead and issue the following command:
sudo apt-get install lxc
Downloading a template and creating a container
The next step, after installing lxc, is to download the template you want and create the container:
sudo lxc-create -t download -n n1
After executing the above command, the system will list the available templates and interactively ask you to choose among the options of Distribution,
In this example, we will use an archlinux image.
Distribution: archlinux
Release: current
Architecture: amd64
Note: Adjust the above options to your needs.
Once the operation is finished, you’ll see the following message:
You just created an ArchLinux container (release=current, arch=amd64, variant=default) For security reason, container images ship without user accounts and without a root password. Use lxc-attach or chroot directly into the rootfs to set a root password or create user accounts.
This means that the container has been created successfully.
You can verify that the container is created by issuing the following command:
sudo lxc-ls --fancy
Which will return:
NAME STATE AUTOSTART GROUPS IPV4 IPV6 n1 STOPPED 0 - - -
Running a container
To run the created container, you have to execute the following command:
sudo lxc-start -n n1 -d
Obviously, n1 is the container we created earlier.
To see if it started, run:
sudo lxc-ls --fancy
Which will now return:
NAME STATE AUTOSTART GROUPS IPV4 IPV6 n1 RUNNING 0 - 10.0.3.119 -
Attaching to a container
You can connect to the running container using the
lxc-attach
command.
sudo lxc-attach -n n1
You will be then logged in as root to the newly created container.
Stopping a container
You can stop a container with the following command:
sudo lxc-stop -n <container name>
For our example:
sudo lxc-stop -n n1
Destroying a container
If you want to completely destroy a container:
sudo lxc-destory -n <container name>
The post Setting up Linux Containers (LXC) appeared first on NixPal.
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