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Migrating to Rootless Docker

 There are three ways of running Docker:

  • Privileged: dockerd run with root, container root = host root
  • Unprivileged: dockerd run with root, container root = mapped user
  • Rootless: dockerd run with some user, container root = some user
I've been hestitating between Unprivileged and Rootless. On one hand, rootless sounds like a great idea; on the other hand, some considers unprivileged user namespace as a security risk.

Today I decided to migrate all my unprivileged containers to rootless ones. I had to enable unprivileged user namespace for a rootless LXC container anyways.


A Cryptic Issue


The migration is overall smooth, except for a cryptic issue: sometimes DNS does not work inside the container.

The symptom is rather unusual: curl works but apt-get does not work. For quite a while I'd thought that apt-get uses some special DNS mechanism.

After some debugging, especially comparing files /etc/ between a unprivileged container and a rootless container, I realized that non-root users cannot access /etc/resolve.conf. This is also quite hidden because I apt-get uses a non-root user to fetch HTTP.

Further digging, eventually I figured that there are special POXIS acl on ~/.local/share/docker/containers, and I should set o+rx by default.

Pros

It is definitely an advantage to elimiate root processes. It is also now easier to manage the containers. I no longer need special visudo files to call maintenance scripts.

With rootless containers, all network interfaces are in a dedicate namespace. A nice side-effect is that all iptables rules will be constrained in this namespace as well. Services running on the host are no longer accessible by the containers, if they are listening on 0.0.0.0 or localhost. Further, Docker will no longer pollute my iptables rules. It will also be easier to migrate to nftables (on the host)

Cons

There is another side-effect with network namespaces: it is trickier to manage port forwarding and firewall rules between the host and containers. slirp4netns and docker proxy handles most parts well, but still a big ugly. Perhaps lxc-user-nic might work better, but it is only experimentally supported in rootlesskit at the moment.

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