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Containerized Linux Print Server using Octoprint - the long way
- Setup The Base Linux OS on the Laptop
  - Create a Bridge for LXC(Linux Containers)
  - Create a partition on Linux that LXD can use as a storage pool
- Install and configure LXD/LXC(Linux Containers)
  - Install the latest stable version of LXD
  - Initialise LXD

Containerized Linux Print Server using Octoprint - the long way

The long way is for if you care about the technical steps and want to reproduce it yourself. See the short way to just get the LXC Octoprint image and get up and running as easy as possible.

The primary purpose of the article is to bookmark and reference my efforts to get Octoprint as opposed to Octopi, up and running on a repurposed redundant HP Laptop.

It might not be obvious why we want to do all of this, so let me start by explaining why all this effort was undertaken. So typically we would run Octopi instead, so Octorpint on a raspberry Pi. The issue with this is that due to chip shortages Pi's are now scarce and very expensive and quite framkly, mine has become slow and frustrating, so running this on a Linux PC is just orders of magnitude faster and more reliable, the issue is that Octoprint only supports one printer at a time, so if we can containerize them, we can keep on expanding until we run our of USB ports, or hardware resources, RAM, CPU and disk space. One instance of Octoprint on my 8 year old HP-Pavilion executes gcode processing about 100 times faster than my Pi 3B and the webcams just never glitch or hang, not to mention print fails because a Pi overheated or stop communicating.

This should be straightforward, how hard can it be, right. I thought so too, but days later I realized that this has to be revisited and documented as I probably will not remember most if what was done by the next time I have to repeat this process.

The basic steps to complete the process were as follow:

Setup The Base Linux OS on the Laptop
Install and configure LXD/LXC(Linux Containers)
Pass Through and set up the printer connection
Pass through and set up the webcam connection
Start up and set up Octprint in the container

Setup The Base Linux OS on the Laptop

Download Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ¹⁾
Create a bootable ISO Using Rufus ²⁾ ³⁾
Boot from the ISO and install Ubuntu
Create a Bridge for LXC(Linux Containers)
Create a partition on Linux that LXD can use as a storage pool

Create a Bridge for LXC(Linux Containers)

The default config typically looks like this:

root@hp-linux:~# nano /etc/netplan/00-installer-config.yaml
# This is the network config written by 'subiquity'
network:
    ethernets:
        eno1:
            dhcp4: true
    version: 2

Amend as folow to add a bridge called br0 to the config.

root@hp-linux:~# cat /etc/netplan/00-installer-config.yaml
# This is the network config written by 'subiquity'
network:
  ethernets:
    eno1: {}
  bridges:
    br0:
      dhcp4: true
      interfaces:
        - eno1
      #gateway4: 192.168.0.1
  version: 2

Adding a bridge allows lxc to assign network accessible DHC assigned IP addresses to the containers, i.e your container will look like regular machines on the network with similar ip addresses to other systems on the router. That will allow you to connect to octoprint using the ip or host name.

We will need br0 in the following steps setting up LXD

Create a partition on Linux that LXD can use as a storage pool

This step basically aims to utilize the remaining disk space that was not allocated by the ubuntu install. The HP system happens to have more that 1TiB of storage and the Linux base OS install only allocated 98GiB by default.

Lots of googling and many articles later ⁴⁾ ⁵⁾ I started with a few commands to asses what is available and how to partition that for use by LXD.

root@hp-linux:~# fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 1.82 TiB, 2000398934016 bytes, 3907029168 sectors
Disk model: ST2000LM003 HN-M
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 1D2EE2A6-79C5-4DBD-B799-42B48F45F62E

Device       Start        End    Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sda1     2048    2203647    2201600    1G EFI System
/dev/sda2  2203648    6397951    4194304    2G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda3  6397952 3907026943 3900628992  1.8T Linux filesystem

Command	Description
pvs	Display information about physical volumes
lvs	Display information about logical volumes
vgs	Display information about volume groups
pvdisplay	Display various attributes of physical volume(s)
lvdisplay	Display information about a logical volume
vgdisplay	Display volume group information
lvmdiskscan	List devices that may be used as physical volumes

Using the commands above to discover what space is available to assign to the lxc storage pool.

root@hp-linux:~# pvs
  PV         VG        Fmt  Attr PSize  PFree
  /dev/sda3  ubuntu-vg lvm2 a--  <1.82t 735.96g
root@hp-linux:~# vgs
  VG        #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize  VFree
  ubuntu-vg   1   2   0 wz--n- <1.82t 735.96g
root@hp-linux:~# lvs
  LV        VG        Attr       LSize   Pool Origin Data%  Meta%  Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert
  lv-lxc    ubuntu-vg -wi-ao----   1.00t
  ubuntu-lv ubuntu-vg -wi-ao---- 100.00g
root@hp-linux:~# pvdisplay
  --- Physical volume ---
  PV Name               /dev/sda3
  VG Name               ubuntu-vg
  PV Size               <1.82 TiB / not usable 4.00 MiB
  Allocatable           yes
  PE Size               4.00 MiB
  Total PE              476150
  Free PE               188406
  Allocated PE          287744
  PV UUID               rvz2ag-hDP0-Yb9l-eCr5-P0lK-vslK-Le7W4u

root@hp-linux:~# vgdisplay
  --- Volume group ---
  VG Name               ubuntu-vg
  System ID
  Format                lvm2
  Metadata Areas        1
  Metadata Sequence No  3
  VG Access             read/write
  VG Status             resizable
  MAX LV                0
  Cur LV                2
  Open LV               2
  Max PV                0
  Cur PV                1
  Act PV                1
  VG Size               <1.82 TiB
  PE Size               4.00 MiB
  Total PE              476150
  Alloc PE / Size       287744 / <1.10 TiB
  Free  PE / Size       188406 / 735.96 GiB
  VG UUID               DfphO5-yeK8-Pkrb-JZh3-TMEU-jLF4-4pn1WY

root@hp-linux:~# lvdisplay
  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Path                /dev/ubuntu-vg/ubuntu-lv
  LV Name                ubuntu-lv
  VG Name                ubuntu-vg
  LV UUID                lupg0H-eV6M-l5YN-UjNV-j75K-P55e-a7hkeg
  LV Write Access        read/write
  LV Creation host, time ubuntu-server, 2023-05-12 10:52:34 +0000
  LV Status              available
  # open                 1
  LV Size                100.00 GiB
  Current LE             25600
  Segments               1
  Allocation             inherit
  Read ahead sectors     auto
  - currently set to     256
  Block device           253:0

  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Path                /dev/ubuntu-vg/lv-lxc
  LV Name                lv-lxc
  VG Name                ubuntu-vg
  LV UUID                b9oWe9-UBQg-yQ3R-Io3F-XcoY-lUm3-cy8GtK
  LV Write Access        read/write
  LV Creation host, time hp-linux, 2023-05-12 12:24:45 +0000
  LV Status              available
  # open                 1
  LV Size                1.00 TiB
  Current LE             262144
  Segments               1
  Allocation             inherit
  Read ahead sectors     auto
  - currently set to     256
  Block device           253:1

The two commands used to set up the spare disk space was:

root@hp-linux:~# lvcreate -L 1T -n lv-lxc ubuntu-vg
root@hp-linux:~# mkfs.ext4 /dev/ubuntu-vg/lv-lxc

The first command creates a local volume of 1TiB names lv-lxc in the ubuntu-vg.

The second command creates an ext4 filesystem on the volume.

Using df and lsblb to initially inspect what we can see:

root@hp-linux:~# df -h
Filesystem                         Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs                              779M  1.7M  778M   1% /run
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv   98G   12G   82G  13% /
tmpfs                              3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                              5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
/dev/sda2                          2.0G  272M  1.6G  15% /boot
/dev/sda1                          1.1G  6.1M  1.1G   1% /boot/efi
tmpfs                              1.0M     0  1.0M   0% /var/snap/lxd/common/ns
tmpfs                              779M  4.0K  779M   1% /run/user/0

No new mounted filesystem, but in the block devices we now have ubuntu–vg-lv–lxc with 1TiB of space assigned.

root@hp-linux:~# lsblk
NAME                      MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
loop0                       7:0    0  63.3M  1 loop /snap/core20/1879
loop1                       7:1    0    73M  1 loop /snap/core22/617
loop2                       7:2    0 111.9M  1 loop /snap/lxd/24322
loop3                       7:3    0  53.2M  1 loop /snap/snapd/19122
loop4                       7:4    0  73.1M  1 loop /snap/core22/634
loop5                       7:5    0  55.6M  1 loop /snap/core18/2745
loop6                       7:6    0 108.5M  1 loop /snap/lxdmosaic/247
loop7                       7:7    0  63.5M  1 loop /snap/core20/1891
sda                         8:0    0   1.8T  0 disk
├─sda1                      8:1    0     1G  0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2                      8:2    0     2G  0 part /boot
└─sda3                      8:3    0   1.8T  0 part
  ├─ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv 253:0    0   100G  0 lvm  /
  └─ubuntu--vg-lv--lxc    253:1    0     1T  0 lvm
sr0                        11:0    1  1024M  0 rom

root@hp-linux:~# lvs
  LV        VG        Attr       LSize   Pool Origin Data%  Meta%  Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert
  lv-lxc    ubuntu-vg -wi-ao----   1.00t
  ubuntu-lv ubuntu-vg -wi-ao---- 100.00g

We can also look at the mountpoints for the block devices like this:

root@hp-linux:~# lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,LABEL,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT
NAME                      FSTYPE      LABEL                      SIZE MOUNTPOINT
loop0                     squashfs                              63.3M /snap/core20/1879
loop1                     squashfs                                73M /snap/core22/617
loop2                     squashfs                             111.9M /snap/lxd/24322
loop3                     squashfs                              53.2M /snap/snapd/19122
loop4                     squashfs                              73.1M /snap/core22/634
loop5                     squashfs                              55.6M /snap/core18/2745
loop6                     squashfs                             108.5M /snap/lxdmosaic/247
loop7                     squashfs                              63.5M /snap/core20/1891
sda                                                              1.8T
├─sda1                    vfat                                     1G /boot/efi
├─sda2                    ext4                                     2G /boot
└─sda3                    LVM2_member                            1.8T
  ├─ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv ext4                                   100G /
  └─ubuntu--vg-lv--lxc    zfs_member  lxd_storage_pool_default     1T
sr0                                                             1024M

lvdisplay gives us the path to the storage pool required for the next steps in LV Path that point to /dev/ubuntu-vg/lv-lxc

Install and configure LXD/LXC(Linux Containers)

Install the latest stable version of LXD
Initialise LXD
- Specify the Bridge for Use that was set up in the OS setup section
- Point the storage pool to the partition created previously
Create and launch a container for octoprint

Install the latest stable version of LXD

At the time of writing this, see file date below right, LXD 5.0 was the stable release candidate, we want ti make sure to run that. My distribution uses snap, so using snap to check versions installed you can run snap list.

root@hp-linux:~# snap list
Name       Version         Rev    Tracking       Publisher   Notes
core18     20230426        2745   latest/stable  canonical✓  base
core20     20230503        1891   latest/stable  canonical✓  base
core22     20230503        634    latest/stable  canonical✓  base
lxd        5.0.2-838e1b2   24322  5.0/stable     canonical✓  -
lxdmosaic  0+git.c6f53f3f  247    latest/stable  turtle0x1   -
snapd      2.59.2          19122  latest/stable  canonical✓  snapd

If you don't have a stable candidate, it can be removed and reinstalled as follow:

root@hp-linux:~# snap remove lxd
root@hp-linux:~# snap install lxd --channel=5.0/stable

Initialise LXD

The next step is to i daemon

      # Default SSL material locations
      ca-base /etc/ssl/certs
      crt-base /etc/ssl/private

      # See: https://ssl-config.mozilla.org/#server=haproxy&server-version=2.0.3&config=intermediate
      ssl-default-bind-ciphers ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:ECDHE-RSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305:DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384
      ssl-default-bind-ciphersuites TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256:TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:TLS_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256
      ssl-default-bind-options ssl-min-ver TLSv1.2 no-tls-tickets

defaults

      log     global
      mode    http
      option  httplog
      option  dontlognull
      timeout connect 5000
      timeout client  50000
      timeout server  50000
      errorfile 400 /etc/haproxy/errors/400.http
      errorfile 403 /etc/haproxy/errors/403.http
      errorfile 408 /etc/haproxy/errors/408.http
      errorfile 500 /etc/haproxy/errors/500.http
      errorfile 502 /etc/haproxy/errors/502.http
      errorfile 503 /etc/haproxy/errors/503.http
      errorfile 504 /etc/haproxy/errors/504.http

frontend public

      bind :::80 v4v6
      use_backend webcam if { path_beg /webcam/ }
      default_backend octoprint

backend octoprint

      option forwardfor
      server octoprint1 127.0.0.1:5000

backend webcam

      http-request replace-path /webcam/(.*)   /\1
      server webcam1  127.0.0.1:8080

</code>

restart the haproxy service
check the status of the service for any error messages after the edits

¹⁾

https://ubuntu.com/download/server

²⁾

https://rufus.ie/en/

³⁾

https://softwaresupply.net/kb/how-to-create-a-bootable-usb-stick/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIh_qe98L8_gIVlGt9Ch0FcwL7EAAYASAAEgJUj_D_BwE

⁴⁾

https://linuxopsys.com/topics/check-unallocated-space-linux#:~:text=Unallocated%20space%20means%20that%20the,a%20particular%20drive%20or%20partition.

⁵⁾

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1029040/how-to-manually-mount-a-partition

Jattie van der Linde

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