[Freedombox-discuss] Debian Wheezy, and LXC

[Johan Henselmans]

Now that Debian Wheezy is officially out,I decided to give it a spin, and see if everything would work with FreeDomBox. I started out with LXC, as it seemed the logical choice to use with FreedomBox. 

As I started with a netinstall CD, I got a whole bunch of packages that were not installed, amongst others curl, lxc, openssh-server, gcc and git.

Unfortunately, LXC still seems to have broken templates.

I  still could not get 
lxc-create -n myfirstcontainer -t debian 
to actually get a debian wheezy container running with the official templates. 

Errors I got during creation: 

-------------
debconf: unable to initialize frontend: 
debconf: (Can't locate Debconf/FrontEnd/.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/perl/5.14.2 /usr/local/share/perl/5.14.2 /usr/lib/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/5.14 /usr/share/perl/5.14 /usr/local/lib/site_perl .) at (eval 26) line 2.)
debconf: falling back to frontend: Noninteractive
-------------

which lead errors after startup with:
lxc-start -n myfirstcontaier
-------------
INIT: Id "6" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "4" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "3" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "2" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "5" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel
-------------

Fix can be found in http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=680469, but it is not official.

It still used the fix, went to /usr/share/lxc/templates, 

did a curl -O http://freedomboxblog.nl/wp-content/uploads/lxc-debian-wheezy.gz
and 
gunzip /usr/share/lxc/templates/lxc-debian-wheezy.gz 

Then I installed 

apt-get install bridge-utils

and added

-------------
auto lo br0
# Bridge setup
 iface br0 inet dhcp
        bridge_ports eth0 
---------------
to /etc/network/interfaces

rebooted the Virtual Machine 

and then created a container with 
lxc-create -n myfirstcontainer -t debian-wheezy, 

which ultimately made a running container, so FreedomBox could reside it's various services in containers. 

Is there any way we could/should warn users of this? I can imagine LXC is something a lot of FreedomBoxers would want to use.


Johan Henselmans
johan at netsense.nl