Netbooting multiple containers

user1111 · Post by **user1111** » Sat Dec 05, 2020 1:55 pm

Scenario : A small office outfit, or a family. Objective : graphical terminal/server type setup, where one desktop is the primary server that can be used as a desktop in itself, and where other devices on the same LAN vnc into that server for their own personal gui desktop (each sees their own individual EasyOS gui desktop).

EasyOS is ideal for that, we simply boot EasyOS and then start the Buster container, and within that we run something like x11vnc -display :1 ... so another device can then vnc into that for its own separate desktop (can independently run Libre Office, Seamonkey ...etc.). That's also a great way to obscure the device, for instance any web site running javascript to identify the fingerprints of the device being used will see the servers fingerprint, not the laptop/whatever device that was actually being used to vnc into the server. The family/office team can also share their desktop between each other, or access other team members desktops, Adam might be :1, Bob :2, Carol :3 ...etc. Also if vnc is set to -shared then mum/dad can monitor/view what the kids are doing by vnc'ing into the kids display/port; As might Bob help/collaborate-with Carol by simply vnc'ing into Carols desktop.

Whilst EasyOS is ideal for such a setup, where even a relatively low spec device can act as the server, a problem is that I'm not finding it easy to set that up. Easy Containers Management has me stumped. Fundamentally all I'm trying to do is set up a second and third Buster Containers, alongside the existing Buster Container, i.e. one for each family/team member, but where all my attempts to do so have failed, I simply do not know how to correctly do that configuring using the Containers Manager. Also when I tried simply duplicating the Buster container in /mnt/wkg/containers ... my endeavours down that avenue also failed.

Help! (TIA)

PS I am aware of how to install other systems ... as per https://bkhome.org/news/201811/racy-pup ... asyos.html but in my case I want duplicates of the same system i.e. Buster containers

user1111 · Post by **user1111** » Sat Dec 05, 2020 4:12 pm

... so I thought I'd try a somewhat roundabout way of trying to get more than 1 buster container instance and I created a buster sfs and set up a repo to serve that - so it might be 'downloaded and installed as a container'.

First issue was that busybox httpd doesn't support simple directory listings, has to have a actual filename. But you can create a cgi-bin folder under the httpd root folder and use a script called index.cgi with content

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
echo "Content-type: text/html" # Tells the browser what kind of content to expect
echo "" # An empty line. Mandatory, if it is missed the page content will not load
echo '<html>
<header><title>This is title</title></header>
<body><pre>'
ls -a "${PWD}/..${REQUEST_URI}"
echo ""
printenv
echo '</pre></body>
</html>'

make the script executable and then ... busybox httpd will show folder listings.

Extracted the easy.sfs, and ran dir2sfs on that, selecting 'desk' type and with the easy sfs package built I dropped that into a three level deep folder tree as indicated by the easyos help contexts, and I then ran the httpd server to serve those files (buster_2.5.1 sfs).

http -fvv . # to start the httpd server
beneath which I also have the cgi-bin folder with the above script, and a easyos/debian/buster folder with the dir2sfs files contained within that.

I set easyos repo listings to include http://localhost ... and also tried http://localhost/easyos/debian/buster (as the SFS_REPOS in /root/.packages/DISTRO_PET_REPOS) ... but either way sfs get ... doesn't see that !!

... so gave up on that idea

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Netbooting multiple containers

Netbooting multiple containers

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