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by szszrk 1154 days ago
LXC doesn't have the images and tools ecosystem around. Also, LXC and Proxmox have a mutual vibe that is amazing to work with (if you care to take a closer look).

LXC is a first class citizen in Proxmox, with clear documentation, config files, CLI tools and web UI. It can be backed-up just like a VM (Proxmox Backup Server FTW!), can be set up mostly like a VM, it boots instantly and so on. It's such a joy to work with, unless you want access to actual hardware (which includes things like mounting or hosting NFS/Samba), but even then it's easy to find help on docs and forums (the latter are surprisingly up to date).

But LXC does not have that "ephemeral" nature like Docker. Container "templates" are clean but full operating systems, full hard drives are connected and host all data, both user files/images and OS. Just like a VM, I guess.

Now, you can actually run Docker inside LXC easily and have best of both worlds: docker with docker-compose and alike to quickly prototype and homelab AND super light and quick to boot machines which will host that Docker for you.

It's actually a very clean and pleasant approach, I highly recommend this as tool for testing and homelabing.
1 comments
MezzoDelCammin 1154 days ago
just out of curiosity - why wouldn't You do a SAMBA in LXC? Specially since there's a turnkey template exactly for this.

Is it for making a RAID directly on the HW drives?

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szszrk 1154 days ago
Oh no, just these services still use some /dev/ and /proc/ stuff, unprivileged container doesn't have access to that. So you either have to run privileged container (I wanted to avoid this), try to pass-through all devices needed, or mount those on the underlying host OS and pass that to container as a bind mount.

For me so far there is always a decent workaround when I want to use USB device etc.. The only thing I am currently stuck with is sound in LXC container (I build kind of a VDI desktop, RDP access to a system with KDE) and struggle to pass the actual sound card through. There is some active proxmox forum thread on that so I'm hopeful.

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