wishlist: connect to lxc container by name using avahi

The templates tweak dhclient.conf so that the container should send its hostname. If you have dnsmasq running (i.e. if you are connecting your clients to a libvirt bridge), and your host has 'nameserver 192.168.122.1' at the top, then you should be able to 'ssh <container>.'.

Since lxc is not setting up your network environment, I'm not sure that it is proper for lxc itself to do any more. Does the above work for you?

Apparently that doesn't work. I modified the host's dhclient.conf to add:

   prepend domain-name-servers 192.168.122.1;

Such that /etc/resolv.conf now contains:

  nameserver 192.168.122.1
  nameserver 10.0.1.1

dnsmasq seems to be running:

   1366 dnsmasq --strict-order --bind-interfaces --pid-file=/var/run/libvirt/network/default.pid --conf-file= --except-interface lo --listen-address 192.168.122.1 --dhcp-range 192.168.122.2,192.168.122.254 --dhcp-lease-max=253 --dhcp-no-override

Interestingly, seems like there's no route to the 192.168.122.0 network on the host, so maybe something is broken on my side:

route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
10.0.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth1
169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 virbr0
0.0.0.0 10.0.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth1
0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 U 1004 0 0 virbr0

After a reboot, this is now working!

May I change the suggestion to use avahi to instead modify the host's dhclient.conf as I done above instead? Or maybe you can come up with a better way to do it.

Quoting Sidnei da Silva (<email address hidden>):
> After a reboot, this is now working!
>
> May I change the suggestion to use avahi to instead modify the host's
> dhclient.conf as I done above instead? Or maybe you can come up with a
> better way to do it.

I'm afraid I know nothing about avahi. Can you explain a bit more about
what you are suggesting?

IIUC your suggestion would be a good one, but should be done for libvirt.

Avahi is nothing more than a multicast-dns implementation. if avahi-daemon is installed in the container and libnss-mdns (IIRC) in the host, then the container will broadcast it's hostname through mdns and the host would be able to resolve it. It might be overkill however, specially since the dhclient/resolv.conf option works fine as you pointed out.

Given comment #5, I am going to mark this 'wontfix', as its a clever idea that seems like overkill.

If someone wants to write the patch to do this I won't be opposed.