OK, so, I have a thing I wrote (
https://github.com/lojban/lbcs) that
does its own simple isolated rootless container management. It
starts a pod and then starts a configurable list of containers
within the pod.
https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/12669#issuecomment-998845927
completely broke one of my setups. Which is fine, but I want to
know what I should be doing instead.
I'm sure it's possible that where I'm going wrong is not where I'm
expecting, so I'm going to try to lay out the whole situation.
Here's the situation. I have a pod in which I run exim,
spamassassin, and clamav. I'm running it rootless, as a user made
for this purpose. Let's say the user's UID is 1000, cuz, you know,
tradition.
I have several things mounted into the containers as a method of
persistence, such as exim's spool directory, clamav's definitions
dir, etc.
Because I'm running rootless, all those files are owned by UID 1000,
as you'd expect. I also run with --userns=keep-id, because, well,
that seems cleanest and most secure? Running thigs as root in the
container seems bad? I'm not sure I actually have a strong
principled reason to be doing that, so let me know if it's a bad
plan.
However, daemons tend to want to run as their own user, so my
standard pattern is:
RUN for user in mail clamupdate clamscan ; \
do \
find / -xdev -user $user -print0 | xargs -r -0 chown <%= userid %> ; \
usermod -o -u <%= userid %> $user ; \
done
, where "<%= userid %>" is replaced with "1000" by the
templating
thingy. So: change the UID of the system user that the daemon runs
at to 1000, and change all files owned by that user to 1000.
This all works fine, I do it in many places, it's fine.
Here's the problem:
exim will *only* run as UID 93.
It is, I shit you not, baked in at compile time ;_;. (See
https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/exim/blob/rawhide/f/exim-4.96-config.p...
and
https://github.com/Exim/exim/blob/cf5f5988102b229ef87bc85ba3f0a9ec265f28a...
). I'm running from the Fedora RPMs. I do not want to roll my own.
I want to pass the network connection between clamav and exim across
localhost, because why have the network connection transit out of
containers?
So what I *used* to have was:
$ podman pod create --share=net --network
slirp4netns:mtu=30000,port_handler=slirp4netns --userns=keep-id -n drata -p 20280:20280 -p
20225:20225 -p 20265:20265 --network slirp4netns:outbound_addr=192.168.123.132
$ podman run --pod=drata --log-driver=none --name exim -t --uidmap 0:1:92 --uidmap
93:0:1 --uidmap 94:95:8192 -v
/home/spdrata/misc-containers/shared_data/var_spool/:/var/spool -v
/home/spdrata/misc-containers/shared_data/srv_lojban:/srv/lojban -i spdrata/drata-exim:1
, and that worked fine. The uidmap maps the user running the
rootless container (UID 1000) on the host to UID
93 in the container.
(Side comment: the documentation for uidmap is *terrible*; coming up
with that uidmap set to do what I want took me *hours* of
experimentation.)
This now simply refuses to work.
So what I'm doing instead is I moved the uidmap onto the pod,
instead of remapping all the system/daemon users to UID 1000, I
remap them to UID 93.
This seems ... icky?, but maybe it's the right way to do it?
Honestly not sure. Looking for advice.
Thanks if you read this far! :D