So what did i learn this week? In review, it feels like nothing, but i did actually stumble over a technology that was new to me, namely multipass. Multipass is a virtualisation platform which has a docker-like feeling. It actually runs on other virtualisation systems, so i guess it’s fair to call it virtualisation middleware.

Multipass makes it really easy to spin up a Linux server on your computer, using the multipass binary. Fetch it from the link above. There are binaries for Mac, Windows and (whoa!) Linux.

If you’re on a Mac, type sudo multipass set local.driver=hyperkit to use the native virtualisation layer. Or if you want to go deeper, fetch and install VirtualBox (which is free to use if you don’t install the extension pack), then use the spell sudo multipass set local.driver=virtualbox.

Launching your first multipass server is a breeze. Type

multipass launch

then wait a while. This will fetch an image then launch a server with the name primary, because each multipass fleet needs a primary server (i’ll probably learn later why). Each next server will get launched from that same image and get an arbitraty name. If you want to name your server, run multipass launch --name deepthought.

To access run commands in the multipass instance, your friend is multipass exec --name marvin ip address. To get a command line on the machine, use multipass shell --name eddie. To list your fleet, type multipass list. To shut down a machine, use multipass stop to stop your primary machine, or multipass stop --name skynet to stop a given one. And to throw away your stopped computers, first use multipass delete --name jarvis, then multipass purge. I’ve yet to learn why you first delete then purge machines, as i don’t relly know what you should do with a deleted instance.

Multipass also accepts cloud-init files to configure your virtual machines. If, for instance, you want to create a new user on your virtual box, create a yaml file like such, adding your public ssh key there instead of mine, and run it with something like multipass launch --name dallas --cloud-init dallas.yaml

# dallas.yaml
---
users:
  - default
  - name: leeloo
    sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL
    ssh_authorized_keys: ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAAD...uuWg7NM= leeloo

If you wanted, you could make sure your packages are apt to date, install, harden, or whatever suits your fancy.

There are tons more, i’m sure, based on the command multipass help, which also gives context sentitive help, so multipass help launch will tell me how i can fetch another image than the latest stable Ubuntu Linux LTS server. Or how i can bind the virtual machine’s network interface to my local network (which seems to require installing VirtualBox and setting up a virtual switch, familiar from my vmWare days).

Next, i think i’m going to try Ansible on these multipass virtual machines.