Monthly Archives: July 2012

Easily ssh to your containers and VMs on Ubuntu 12.04

With the DNS changes in Ubuntu 12.04, most development machines running with libvirt and lxc end up running quite a few DNS servers.

These DNS servers work fine when queried from a system on their network, but aren’t integrated with the main dnsmasq instance and so won’t let you resolve your VM and containers from outside of their respective networks.

One way to solve that is to install yet another DNS resolver and use it to redirect between the various dnsmasq instances. That can quickly become tricky to setup and doesn’t integrate too well with resolvconf and NetworkManager.

Seeing a lot of people wondering how to solve that problem, I took a few minutes yesterday to come up with an ssh configuration that’d allow one to access their containers and VM using their name.

The result is the following, to add to your ~/.ssh/config file:

Host *.lxc
  StrictHostKeyChecking no
  UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
  ProxyCommand nc $(host $(echo %h | sed "s/\.lxc//g") 10.0.3.1 | tail -1 | awk '{print $NF}') %p

Host *.libvirt
  StrictHostKeyChecking no
  UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
  ProxyCommand nc $(host $(echo %h | sed "s/\.libvirt//g") 192.168.122.1 | tail -1 | awk '{print $NF}') %p

After that, things like:

  • ssh user@myvm.libvirtu
  • ssh ubuntu@mycontainer.lxc

Will just work.

For LXC, you may also want to add a “User ubuntu” line to that config as it’s the default user for LXC containers on Ubuntu.
If you configured your bridges with a non-default subnet, you’ll also need to update the IPs or add more sections to the config.

These also turn off StrictHostKeyChecking and UserKnownHostsFile as my VMs and containers are local to my machine (reducing risk of MITM attacks) and tend to exist only for a few hours, to then be replaced by a completely different one with a different SSH host key. Depending on your setup, you may want to remove these lines.

Posted in Canonical voices, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | 15 Comments