lxd

Two months ago, I wrote about the LXD fork called Incus that was in the works. The first release of Incus is out and looks interesting. I haven’t installed it yet, but did give it a try online. It is very similar to LXD but has some nice changes. First, the simplification around instances rather than having separate containers and virtual machines is nice. It breaks backwards compatibility but makes things simpler going forward.

I did a little bit more testing with OpenTofu today. This time with LXD. There was a new alpha version of OpenTofu released to fix a bug so I installed that one to keep current. I didn’t encounter the bug although I did use the sensitive variable tag. An init, plan, apply and destroy loop worked flawlessly with the following simple LXD configuration: terraform { required_providers { lxd = { source = "terraform-lxd/lxd" } } } resource "lxd_instance" "tofu1" { name = "tofu1" image = "ubuntu:22.

I haven’t used LXD much recently but it’s a very nice container and virtual machine management system. I’ve done a few things with it in the past and it works really well. I noticed the other day through some web browsing that Canonical was withdrawing LXD from the Linux Container project and would be developing it in-house. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. This piece in The Register outlines why that is.

I tried to follow the documentation to run MicroK8s on LXD. However, it didn’t work because the microk8s nodes (really node since I was just trying on one system) wouldn’t start. I’m not sure of the root cause of that but it was vexing. After a little bit of searching, I found an article on the Ubuntu blog that described running Apache Spark on MicroK8s on Ubuntu Core in the cloud.

I use LXD to create virtual servers on my main system to experiment around with stuff I might not want to install directly. It’s simple, fast and works well. I was curious if I could use it to do the same thing on a cloud server at Hetzner. The only problem was how to access the LXD container from outside. They are assigned IP4 addresses but those aren’t routable. However, the IPv6 address are routable.