[lxc-users] unprivileged container won't start; is encrypted home directory the problem?

[Josh Ford]

First -- thanks to all for the fantastic work on LXC! 

First-time question here...

My platform is:

Ubuntu 14.10
LVM disk encryption
Encrypted home directory for the user that is creating and starting the container (this is a laptop).

I'm having an issue starting unprivileged containers -- though I've had success running privileged containers in the past without problems on the same platform. 

I followed the "Creating unprivileged containers as a user" under the Getting Started guide found at https://linuxcontainers.org/lxc/getting-started/.  Everything works great until I try to start the container -- which is when I get the following error:

jimmy at jimmyscomputer:~$ lxc-start -n p1 -F


"lxc-start: start.c: print_top_failing_dir: 102 Permission denied - could not access /home/jimmy.  Please grant it 'x' access, or add an ACL for the container root.
lxc-start: sync.c: __sync_wait: 51 invalid sequence number 1. expected 2
lxc-start: start.c: __lxc_start: 1087 failed to spawn 'p1'
lxc-start: lxc_start.c: main: 337 The container failed to start.
lxc-start: lxc_start.c: main: 341 Additional information can be obtained by setting the --logfile and --logpriority options."


'lxc-start' is being executed by jimmy, so why can't lxc-start access jimmy's home directory?  Jimmy can certainly execute other commands in that directory. 

Here's the ~/.config/default.config:


lxc.network.type = veth
lxc.network.link = lxcbr0
lxc.network.flags = up
lxc.network.hwaddr = 00:16:3e:xx:xx:xx
lxc.id_map = u 0 100000 65536
lxc.id_map = g 0 100000 65536

And here's the  ~/.local/share/lxc/p1/config:


# Template used to create this container: /usr/share/lxc/templates/lxc-download
# Parameters passed to the template: -d ubuntu -r trusty -a amd64
# For additional config options, please look at lxc.container.conf(5)

# Distribution configuration
lxc.include = /usr/share/lxc/config/ubuntu.common.conf
lxc.include = /usr/share/lxc/config/ubuntu.userns.conf
lxc.arch = x86_64

# Container specific configuration
lxc.id_map = u 0 100000 65536
lxc.id_map = g 0 100000 65536
lxc.rootfs = /home/jimmy/.local/share/lxc/p1/rootfs
lxc.utsname = p1

# Network configuration
lxc.network.type = veth
lxc.network.link = lxcbr0
lxc.network.flags = up
lxc.network.hwaddr = 00:16:3e:xx:xx:xx

The rootfs is there, and is owned by 100000.  

Poor jimmy.  The only quirk I can think of here is that jimmy's home directory is encrypted [??]  Just a wild guess though.

Many thanks in advance for any help you can provide -- and again, thanks for all the work on LXC.  Very cool stuff. 

Oh -- also -- is there some easy way to search the list archives? Apologies if that's a silly question, but I was trying to solve this myself and didn't see a way to do it other than to browse through each thread.

Cheers,

Josh