#1

Greetings!

I have followed the getting started section for setting up a Fedora CoreOS bare metal installation. I’m past the ignition piece and I can successfully ssh and get a bash prompt. I am interested in using toolbox from here to create mutable containers.

I am doing something wrong because when I try to run toolbox enter i get the error:

toolbox: failed to start container fedora-toolbox-32

Is there some additional configuration that is needed for toolbox to work OOTB?

Podman seems to be working fine I ran this sample from podman’s website:

$ podman run -dt -p 8080:8080/tcp registry.fedoraproject.org/f29/httpd

I can connect to apache on port 8080 without any issues.

I removed the fedora-toolbox-32 container using podman and re-ran toolbox create but it still fails when I run toolbox enter

I also tried running sudo toolbox enter even though I realize that defeats the purpose of podman. This gave me a different error:

toolbox: unable to migrate containers: runtime directory not created

What am I doing wrong? Should I not be using toolbox?

#2

I tried to run the container with podman start fedora-toolbox-32 and now I think I found the underlying error.

Error: unable to start container "fedora-toolbox-32": error looking up supplemental groups for container 1145d9b3e64a8be5e99c9e88bd64829fc455a080036bb14dbd889a3f69e14118: Unable to find group sudo

Does this mean that I need to add a sudoers group in my ignition configuration? I did notice that the sudo command works with the default ‘core’ user for tasks such as restarting the machine.

#3

I don’t understand the issue but from what I’m reading I should probably be using docker files or buildah when I want to create a new container / image. If that’s correct, I wonder what the use cases are for toolbox in CoreOS.

The first thing I was going to try and do was create a bind9 server container and I’d rather do it the old fashioned way by using a package manager and writing zone files, etc… then snapshot the image as I make those changes. It seems like this is exactly what buildah is for.

#4

Hi and welcome!

Sorry for the troubles. There are already multiple reported issues with toolbox, see https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker/issues?q=label%3Acomponent%2Ftoolbox+.

However, toolbox is only meant as a last-resort debugging tool and should not be used for running real services.

Please directly use podman for that, possibly within a dedicated systemd service unit. There a few examples in our docs at https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-coreos/running-containers/. However, you’ll need to tweak those to suit the actual container image (and configuration/resources) you are targeting.

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#5

The problem has been put aside with many others because Toolbox was being rewritten from Shell to Go and that took most of the time. The rewrite is more-or-less done now so the bug could be fixed relatively soon.

I apologize for all inconveniences caused by this.

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#6

Any chance toolbox might work in testing or next?

#7

There is a patch ready to be merged. It just need to get merged and a release put out. https://github.com/containers/toolbox/pull/401