When using QEMU/KVM, there are many methods to share data between the host system and guest virtual machines. In this tutorial, we focus on creating a filesystem passthrough, using virt-manager or by manually editing a virtual machine definition, and we learn how to mount a host directory inside a virtualized guest.
mount
How to create a backup with Proxmox backup client
While in the first part of this series dedicated to the Proxmox backup server we saw how to install the distribution, and in the second we explored the web administration interface, in this third tutorial, we learn how to create and restore a backup of a physical host using the Proxmox backup client.
How to mount a remote filesystem over SSH with sshfs
SSH (Secure Shell) is a protocol used to establish an encrypted connection with a remote machine using a client-server model: the ssh server runs on the machine we want to access remotely, while a client is used on the machines from which we want to connect. Thanks to sshfs, we can use an existing SSH connection to mount a remote directory in a secure way, without using additional services like NFS or Samba.
Introduction to the OverlayFS
The OverlayFS pseudo-filesystem was first included in the Linux kernel 3.18 release: it allows us to combine two directory trees or filesystems (an “upper” and a “lower one”) in a way that is completely transparent to the user, which is able to access files and directories on the “merged” layer just like he would do on a standard filesystem.
How to set filesystems mount order on modern Linux distributions
In a previous tutorial we discussed about the /etc/fstab file, and how it is used to declare the filesystems which should be mounted on boot. In the pre-Systemd era, filesystem where mounted in the order specified in the /etc/fstab file; on modern Linux distributions, instead, for a faster boot, filesystem are mounted in parallel. Systemd manages the mounting of filesystems via specifically designed units automatically generated from /etc/fstab entries. For these reasons a different strategy must be adopted to establish the dependency between two filesystems, and therefore to set their correct mount order.
How to mount a Samba shared directory at boot
Samba is a free and open source interoperability suite of programs which allows us to share files and printers between machines running Linux or Windows. A Samba share is pretty easy to configure and can easily be accessed on clients, since the vast majority of Linux file explorers has built-in support samba. In certain situations, however, we may want to mount a Samba share at boot, just like a normal filesystem on a specified mountpoint.