[Discussion] Multi user server? Instead of full VM?

[nreith]

For a remote server alternative to nested kvm or qemu (cli only) dev vms for individuals on my team, what might be the limitations of distrobox?

My use case sounds a whole lot like the one the maintainer Luca had that motivated him to create distrobox in the first place. Locked down corporate laptop. In my case I would also like to extend this to a locked down corporate server with awful Oracle Enterprise Linux. I can have limited sudo with enough hassle that I don’t want to use it often. Or I can put in a request to have certain things like Docker or Podman installed.

Specifically, the problems I am trying to solve are

1. Isolation to avoid junior devs mucking up the host and to avoid annoying port conflicts on a shared server. Possibly even give each their own ip address with macvlan or ipvlan.
2. Server on prem for faster networking in a network environment more similar to prod, so devs with slow internet and vpn don’t suffer and they don’t have to encounter strange problems when deploying that didn’t exist locally with spit tunnel vpn.
3. Server on prem so when juniors or Linux newbies need help seniors can help debug via ssh in a shell or vs code instead of remote screen sharing, which is painful.
4. Most importantly, minimal fiddliness for me and seniors to manage. And minimal change in workflow for juniors from Ubuntu vm with docker and sudo.

Ideally the team members would ssh directly into distrobox or jump via host or simply have bashrc enter for them.

I don’t mind adding all to docker user group or equivalent for podman if required so they can use sudo inside of distrobox but I don’t want to add all to sudo or wheel group.

I have seen you can run docker inside distrobox and confirm it works. But I don’t know if this requires full sudo on the host or if the docker inside distrobox would block ports on the host.

Help me out. Has anyone already tried something like this in an HPC multi user server type environment? What papercuts am I likely to see?