Interactive Linux login environment in App

[fa2k]

I'd like an App where you can log on using SSH and get a command line, with a small set of software installed (or just a bare Ubuntu). Have anyone successfully implemented this? I don't even need a persistent storage for this container, it could mount /home on the NAS storage and software could be managed by conda or similar. The challenge is how to make a docker image or chart that allows public-key SSH login with a given UID, and run this on a dedicated IP address.

It would be like a VM, but the advantage* of using a container would be to have access to the full CPU and RAM resources of the NAS hardware, and direct access to the storage using a bind mount (instead of running NFS over a virtual NIC, which introduces a lot of inefficiencies). Compounding this, if I use a VM and dedicate 16 GB to it, the RAM used by Services seems much higher - close to 32 GB.
(* In other cases it could be a disadvantage to use the full resources)

It's not exactly the intended usage, I get that it's a bit hacky thing to do - hope you consider sharing experience or tips anyway.

 

[winnielinnie]

Something like this?

Use a custom "Jail" in SCALE? (Possible? Alternatives?)

Being less familiar with Docker/Kubernetes and containers, while having good results with Jails under TrueNAS Core, I'm curious if it's possible to do the following in SCALE: Have a standalone "from scratch" container with specific CLI tools, mount points, and the ability to SSH into such a...

www.truenas.com

Separate Linux container?

It's not a very good thread title, but I'm not sure how to better phrase it. I'm continuing to look into migrating from CORE to SCALE, and the major question is migrating jails. I get that it's a manual process, and I'm OK with that. Most of my jails are running things that are available as...

www.truenas.com

 

[fa2k]

Thanks for the pointers winnie, exactly like that. I didn't think to search for that, but now there's yet another set of search terms that point to these threads :)

 

[fa2k]

After a lot of work I found a solution for me. I don't think it applies to the other threads though - it will be different in each case. I made a docker image based on Ubuntu, with an SSH server that can be used by a single user - https://github.com/fa2k/dockerfiles/blob/main/my-login-node/Dockerfile
It's probably not a good idea for others to use this directly, so I don't share my docker hub URL. Note I take great care to make sure the host keys are not in the docker image, to prevent man in the middle attacks.

I first tried the image from Linuxserver.io (which I generally like) https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/openssh-server
I wasn't able to run the binaries I had from other systems. It probably uses a quite special base image, that doesn't support the same glibc version or what ever.