[Podman] Re: Should I run podman-based systemd services as root?

On 7/28/23 09:27, Mark Raynsford via Podman wrote: I think your architecture question is fascinating, and certainly a topic I've been interested in. I agree wholeheartedly with Dan's defense-in-depth philosophy, those are wise words to stand upon. This is elegantly reflected by the architecture you've described (multiple host users running rootless containers). Lots and lots of safety layers there. I also hear you loud and clear about this being a PITA to manage. My experience is, it can get even trickier when you bring in something like Ansible to "help" manage it :( Esp., as you also found, the storage ownership mess very quickly gets out of hand. --- Side-note: This is what prompted my earlier question to this list: "Ansible `template` tasks and rootless podman volume content management" --- In all cases, try to step back to first-principals: There's always a push-and-pull between "security" vs "usability" (or "ease of use", "management", "convenience", etc.). Most often, you give up one to get some of the other. Exceptions to this seem to be incredibly rare (SELinux may be one from a user's POV). So for an architecture like you described, perhaps it's simply past the "reasonably practical" point. Maybe it's "okay" to use a single (host) user to run all the containers? You can still leverage pods to segregate networking, cgroups for resources, and volumes to carve up storage (with careful attention to your `:z` and `:Z`s). I would also agree this is slightly "less safe". However, the alternative may (unfortunately) be 100% secure: The system never gets deployed at all, because it's simply too unwieldy for a human (and/or Ansible) to manage. I'm still curious to hear other opinions on this topic though. --- Chris Evich (he/him), RHCA III Senior Quality Assurance Engineer If there's a "hard-way", I'm the first one to implement it.