`dest` is not a valid option for the `--mount` argument to `podman`. To
specify where the target path, only `target`, `destination`, and `dst`
are valid.
`upsmon` is the component of NUT that tracks the status of UPSs and
reacts to their changing by sending notifications and/or shutting down
the system. It is a networked application that can run on any system;
it can run on a different system than `upsd`, and indeed can run on
multiple systems simultaneously.
Each system that runs `upsmon` will need a username and password for
each UPS it will monitor. Using the CUE [function pattern][0], I've
made it pretty simple to declare the necessary values under
`nut.monitor`.
[0]: https://cuetorials.com/patterns/functions/
*collectd* logs to syslog, so its output is lost when it's running in a
container. We can capture messages from it by mounting the journald
syslog socket into the container.
The `/run/udev/rules.d` directory may not always exist, especially at
boot. We need to ensure that it does before we try to copy rules
exported by containers into it, or the unit will fail.
Even with *collectd* configured to report filesystem usage by device, it
still only reports filesystems that are mounted (in its namespace).
Thus, in order for it to report filesystems like `/boot`, these need to
be mounted in the container.
I keep going back-and-forth on whether or not collectd should run in a
container on Fedora CoreOS machines. On the one hand, running it
directly on the host allows it to monitor filesystem usage by mount
point, which is consistent with how non-FCOS machines are monitored.
On the other hand, installing packages on FCOS with `rpm-ostree` is a
nightmare. It's _incredibly_ slow. There's also occasionally issues
installing packages if the base layer has not been updated in a while
and the new packages require an existing package to be updated.
For the NUT server specifically, I have changed my mind again: the
*collectd-nut* package depends on *nut-client*, which in turn depends on
Python. I definitely want to avoid installing Python on the host, but I
do not want to lose the ability to monitor the UPSs via collectd. Using
a container, I can strip out the unnecessary bits of *nut-client* and
avoid installing Python at all. I think that's worth having to monitor
filesystem usage by device instead of by mount point.
The only privilege NUT needs is access to the USB device nodes. Using a
device CGroup rule to allow this is significantly better than disabling
all restrictions. Especially since I discovered that `--privileged`
implies `--security-opt label=disable`, effectively disabling SELinux
confinement of the container.
NUT needs some udev rules in order to set the proper permissions on USB
etc. devices so it can run as an otherwise unprivileged user. Since
udev rules can only be processed on the host, these rules need to be
copied out of the container and evaluated before the NUT server starts.
To enable this, the *nut-server* container image copies the rules it
contains to `/etc/udev/rules.d` if that directory is a mount point. By
bind mounting a directory on the host at that path, we can get a copy of
the rules files outside the container. Then, using a systemd path unit,
we can tell the udev daemon to reload and reevaluate its rules.
SELinux prevents processes in containers from writing to
`/etc/udev/rules.d` directly, so we have to use an intermediate location
and then copy the rules files to their final destination.
Dustin