[Lxc-users] lxc headeache on debian wheezy

[Loïc]

Hi everybody,

I'm sorry, since I'm pretty sure that this have been taken care of
already, but I just subscribed and searching the archives has proven to
be a bit of a pain.

Anyway, here are my problems:

I'm a happy vserver user on Debian 6 (squeeze). Since Debian wheezy is
going to drop vserver support for lxc, I took this occasion to rent a
new server on which I installed wheezy in the hope of migrating my
various vservers into a lxc setup.

I read http://wiki.debian.org/LXC and created my first container this
way, as stated:

# lxc-create -n vshell01 -t debian

Then I wanted to start this container:

# lxc-start -n vshell01

Which gives a lot of unwanted results:

INIT: version 2.88 booting
[info] Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel S.
hostname: you must be root to change the host name
mount: permission denied
mount: permission denied
mount: permission denied
mount: permission denied
[info] Setting the system clock.
hwclock: Cannot access the Hardware Clock via any known method.
hwclock: Use the --debug option to see the details of our search for an access method.
[warn] Unable to set System Clock to: Sun Jul 29 19:08:40 UTC 2012 ... (warning).
[ ok ] Activating swap...done.
mount: permission denied
mount: permission denied
mount: permission denied
mount: permission denied
[warn] Mount point '/dev/console' does not exist. Skipping mount. ... (warning).
[warn] Mount point '/dev/ptmx' does not exist. Skipping mount. ... (warning).
[ ok ] Activating lvm and md swap...done.
[....] Checking file systems...fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
done.
[ ok ] Mounting local filesystems...done.
[ ok ] Activating swapfile swap...done.
[ ok ] Cleaning up temporary files....
[ ok ] Configuring network interfaces...done.
[ ok ] Cleaning up temporary files....
[ ok ] Setting kernel variables ...done.
[FAIL] startpar: service(s) returned failure: hostname.sh ... failed!
INIT: Entering runlevel: 2
[info] Using makefile-style concurrent boot in runlevel 2.
[....] Starting OpenBSD Secure Shell server: sshdCould not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key
Could not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key
Could not load host key: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_ecdsa_key

Damn, that's really not that polished:

1/ "you must be root to change the hostname" message.
2/ mount reports a lot of permission denied.
3/ hwclock is unable to set the system clock
4/ the sshd service which seems to have been installed from the template is unable to load its keys.

All of which I am ready to deal with later, but the most important one for me is the messages I got after the boot process:

INIT: Id "4" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "2" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "5" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "6" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: Id "3" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes
INIT: no more processes left in this runlevel

Which means that I'm stuck in the container console without a shell :(

I googled a bit and found this:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=662913

Following the advises here, I kindly installed the linux-container package, and installed the resulting .deb package from /var/cache/apt/archives into /usr/share/lxc.
That seems to make no difference when I destroy and recreate my container.

The maintainer also advises to read the doc into /usr/share/doc/lxc, rather than the Debian wiki page.
So I did, and found nothing close to the instructions on the wiki page, just a few steps that were not that useful.

To add insult to injury, when I open a new shell on my host and try to stop the container I cannot access, like this:
# lxc-halt -n vshell01
... the connection to my host is dropping. I cannot access the host again unless I ask the hosting provider to perform an electrical reboot of the server.

I cannot believe that lxc is that immature. I may surely be missing a lot of things, or is the Debian packaging of lxc such a pity?

Help will be warmly welcome.
Thanks for reading, and for any clue :)

Kind regards.

-- 
Loïc