this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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Hi everyone! I want to be able to access a folder inside the guest that corresponds to a cloud drive that is mounted inside the guest for security purposes. I have tried setting up a shared filesystem inside Virt-Manager (KVM) with virtiofs (following this tutorial: https://absprog.com/post/qemu-kvm-shared-folder) but as soon as I mount the folder in order for it to be accessible on the ~~guest~~ host the cloud drive gets unmounted. I guess a folder cannot have two mounts at the same time. Aliasing the folder using bind and then sharing the aliased folder with the host doesn't work either. The aliased folder is simply empty on the host.

Does anyone have an idea regarding how I might accomplish this? Is KVM the right choice or would something like docker or podman better suited for this job? Thank you.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You don't

That is going to be painful and not beneficial

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I strongly disagree why this would not be beneficial. Could you expand?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

You will need to mange the VM separately and the added hop (into the VM and then out again) will slow down performance and create another point of failure.

Why would running it in a VM benefit security? Couldn't you just mount it with fuse?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Maybe NFS share the drive from guest to host?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What would be the performance implications? Isn't virtiofs theoretically faster?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not an expert.
Assuming it's internal I'd assume it's probably as fast as the guest nic allows?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

Fair. I will try NFS if anything else fails. Thanks :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This, had the same idea for other purposes, sharing a folder from vm to host through network share is the easiest way. Every other solution looks more elegant on paper but has lots of pitfalls.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Every other solution looks more elegant on paper but has lots of pitfalls

A very sane and fair comment.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I can try but I might end up in the same situation as with virtiofs. The cloud drive will get unmounted and I will end up with an empty folder when I try to access it from the host.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Absolutely not, NFS is a shared mount. Virtiofs is more complicated because it is emulating a block device.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Then I will try NFS and get back to you. Thanks :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Maybe see if 'rclone mount' solves the problem for ya. Rclone can often be a super handy swiss army knife for stuff like this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

The cloud binary is proprietary and it's not supported by rclone unless I find out how the binary works but I doubt it uses something standardized like WebDAV underneath.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

You say it is mounted. Then you can share it in all the same ways as you would share any other of the VM's folders.

I am using SMB shares for that (but that is not always the best way ofc).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

The cloud drive is mounted on the guest, yes, but once I mount it with virtiofs in order to share it with the host it gets unmounted and I end up with an empty folder. bind doesn't work either.