Describe the different major modes of Lima operation

[afbjorklund]

Some users that are new to Lima, are surprised that it mirrors the host user and mounts the home directory.

Explain the "machine" way-of-working, like in Docker Machine and Podman Machine, that Lima implements.

• It copies the $USER and uid from the host
• It mounts the $HOME directory in the guest
• It forwards published ports over to localhost
• It starts a container engine (possibly on-demand)

Also mention that there is also a plain mode, where those features are disabled and it is more of a "dumb" VM.

Users that are coming from a Vagrant background, have some different expectations on what Lima should do.

[afbjorklund]

Example comments:

"To me it's somewhat surprising as a user that Lima auto-mounts anything at all, and I always have to go digging through the docs to remind myself how it works. As far as the docs go, it's not mentioned on the filesystem mounts page; the only reference I can find is under examples."

"Slightly off-topic but why is the user's home directory automounted? I was a little taken aback by this. I'd rather Lima used a secure-out-of-the-box approach and would not expose the contents of $HOME to the VM by default."

https://youtu.be/R2wGui_NHPA "Pay no attention to the VM behind the curtain!"

• docs: discourage /tmp/lima on shared hosts (and deprecate it?) #3648

• Using lima as an oss alternative to vagrant #1749

[afbjorklund]

Currently there is no built-in feature to disable copying the user information into the cloud-config, instead of using the default name from the cloud-init image (or something generic like "lima"). Maybe that should also be optional, eventually.

i.e. exposing the value of $USER to the VM

/etc/cloud/cloud.cfg

# A set of users which may be applied and/or used by various modules
# when a 'default' entry is found it will reference the 'default_user'
# from the distro configuration specified below
users:
  - default

# System and/or distro specific settings
# (not accessible to handlers/transforms)
system_info:
  # This will affect which distro class gets used
  distro: ubuntu
  # Default user name + that default users groups (if added/used)
  default_user:
    name: ubuntu
    lock_passwd: True
    gecos: Ubuntu
    groups: [adm, cdrom, dip, lxd, sudo]
    sudo: ["ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL"]
    shell: /bin/bash

Not knowing the uid and homedir up front could be a bit of a pain

Then again, the name (for ssh) isn't initially known by the host either...

---

There is a top-level ssh_authorized_keys for the default_user account.

https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/modules.html#mod-cc-ssh

Not sure how you get the user name, but probably from log (or metadata)?

ci-info: ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Authorized keys from /home/anders.linux/.ssh/authorized_keys for user anders+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++