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Why would someone want containers managed by systemd instead of just having them run like normal? What is the advantage?
Also if you use cockpit or some equivalent GUI to manage your containers, do you have to give it permission to control all systemd services?
I've been managing my containers using the older mechanism (systemd-generate) since I started and it's great. You get the reliable service start of systemd and its management interface. Monitoring is consistent with all your other services and you have your logs in exactly one location.
I really wouldn't want a separate interface or service manager just because I'm running containers.
Do you run other things on your system other than containers? I have a VM that only runs containers so it really doesn't do anything else with systemd apart from the basics so I'm curious if there would be any advantage to me switching.
Most VMs only run containers, but I have supporting services on every host as well. Stuff like the mesh VPN, monitoring agent or firewall.
If I want a quick overview, a quick
systemctl statuswill tell me everything I need to know.What do you have set up for mesh VPN?
I use Yggdrasil now with a whitelist of public keys. Though I'm thinking about redoing my architecture in general to make key distribution easier, have more automated DNS entries and also use the tunnel for any node to node communication.
Before that I tried Tailscale with Headscale, but I didn't want to have a single node responsible for the network and discovery.
That's very interesting. Once you connect something to your mesh you can access the rest of the mesh by IP? What is the gateway in that case?
Apologies for the late response
I can access every node by IP (IPv6 to be precise).
Discovery within a local network happens through regular broadcasts. For connecting different networks, you need to set peering addresses that are reachable and configure the other side to listen.
You only need one node per network though, the others will automatically discover the path and connect on the best route to their target. If your node in the middle falls over, any other node that's reachable can be used instead. The Yggdrasil Blog posts have some explainations of the algorithms used.
There's no explicit gateway, but you can use standard routing and firewall tools to do whatever you want. I only use it for accessing internal stuff, not as a full VPN for my client devices, but you could probably make that work by setting one node as router and configure its Yggdrasil ip as you gateway (excluding the traffic you need to connect to the VPN).
One downside is that everything's still in progress and most versions change significant parts of the routing scheme, meaning it doesn't work with the previous version. It is primarily a research tool for internet scale mesh networks, but releases are also infrequent enough where you shouldn't worry too much.
Thank you! It sounds like a really interesting tool. I'd like to have a VPC sort of setup for my devices that I can connect to externally. I don't think I need the mesh aspect of it, I'd likely just have one VPN act as a hub. But I'll definitely look into this more. If it does routing for IPs a bit more conveniently that'd be worth it to me.
Why would you not want containers managed by systemd?
You get the benefits of containerisation and you don't have to learn the arcane syntax of some container engine or another.
Dunno what's arcane about setting your network up once, crrate the compose (jn my case regular docker) and write
sudo docker compose up -d.Literally using Linux in any way shape or form is more arcane than this.
Just recently learning about NFS sharing. Sure, let's write the config in /etc/export and also edit the fstab config on the guest to auto-mount it. Don't forget the whole syntax ;)
Not the mention the 100 different ways of setting up a static IP in each distro which differs slightly in any package/distro
because lennart poettering is an asshole.