Monthly Archives: September 2012

Introducing the python LXC API

One of our top goals for LXC upstream work during the Ubuntu 12.10 development cycle was reworking the LXC library and turn it from a private library mostly used by the other lxc-* commands into something that’s easy for developers to work with and is accessible from other languages with some bindings.

Although the current implementation isn’t complete enough to consider the API stable and some changes will still happen to it over the months to come, we have pushed the initial implementation to the LXC staging branch on github and put it into the lxc package of Ubuntu 12.10.

The initial version comes with a python3 binding packaged as python3-lxc, that’s what I’ll use now to give you an idea of what’s possible with the API. Note that as we don’t have full user namespaces support at the moment, any code using the LXC API needs to run as root.

First, let’s start with the basics, creating a container, starting it, getting its IP and stopping it:

#!/usr/bin/python3
import lxc
container = lxc.Container("my_container")
container.create("ubuntu", {"release": "precise", "architecture": "amd64"})
container.start()
print(container.get_ips(timeout=10))
container.shutdown(timeout=10)
container.destroy()

So, pretty simple.
It’s also possible to modify the container’s configuration using the .get_config_item(key) and .set_config_item(key, value) functions. For those keys supporting multiple values, a list will be returned and a list will be accepted as a value by .set_config_item.

Network configuration can be accessed through the .network property which is essentially a list of all network interfaces of the container, properties can be changed that way or through .set_config_item and saved to the config file with .save_config().

The API isn’t terribly well documented at this point, help messages are present for all functions but there’s no generated html help yet.

To get a better idea of the functions exported by the API, you may want to look at the API test script. This script uses all the functions and properties exported by the python module so it should be a reasonable reference.

Posted in Canonical voices, LXC, Planet Ubuntu | Tagged | 11 Comments

Dual-stack 3G connections

A few months ago, I received two test SIM cards for Orange Poland’s new IPv6 network.

The interesting thing about this network is that it’s running IPv6 in a fairly unusual configuration and it was interesting to see how to get that work on Ubuntu.

This network uses two separate APNs, one for IPv4 (internet) and one for IPv6 (internetipv6).
Using two separate APNs is certainly easier on the carrier’s infrastructure side as they can get IPv6 online without actually changing anything on the IPv4 equipement, however that means that any client wanting to use both protocols at once needs to use multiple PDP contexts.

I’m now going to detail how to manually configure ppp to connect to such a network:
/etc/ppp/peers/orange

noauth
connect "/usr/sbin/chat -e -f /etc/ppp/peers/orange-connect"
/dev/ttyACM0
460800
+ipv6

/etc/ppp/peers/orange-connect

TIMEOUT 5
ABORT BUSY
ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
ABORT VOICE
ABORT 'NO DIALTONE'
ABORT 'NO ANSWER'
ABORT DELAYED
ABORT ERROR
'' \nAT
TIMEOUT 12
OK ATH
OK ATE1
OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet"'
OK 'AT+CGDCONT=2,"IPV6","internetipv6"'
OK ATD*99#
CONNECT ""

Then all that’s needed is a good old:

pon orange

And a few seconds later, I’m getting the following on ppp0:

ppp0      Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol  
          inet addr:87.96.119.169  P-t-P:10.6.6.6  Mask:255.255.255.255
          inet6 addr: 2a00:f40:2100:ac9:8c1e:da60:93e2:c234/64 Scope:Global
          inet6 addr: 2a00:f40:2100:ac9::1/64 Scope:Global
          inet6 addr: fe80::1/10 Scope:Link
          UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:13 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:23 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:3 
          RX bytes:354 (354.0 B)  TX bytes:767 (767.0 B

This config should work for any mobile network using a similar setup (likely to become more and more popular as the various RIRs are running out of IPv4).

Sadly ModemManager/NetworkManager don’t support mutliple PDP contexts yet, though it’s being discussed upstream, so we can hope to see something land soon.

Apparently multiple PDP contexts support is also dependant on hardware. In my case, I’ve been using an “old” Nokia E51 over USB as I didn’t have any luck getting that to work with an Android phone. My Nokia N900 also worked but required a custom kernel to be installed first to properly handle IPv6.

Posted in Canonical voices, IPv6, Planet Ubuntu | 4 Comments