Questions/troubles from trying out

[yarikoptic]

I did podman-compose up on another local server (well -- laptop). That concluded (as no more progress) with some inconclusive (I was hoping for some message or logs)

Trying to pull ghcr.io/fnndsc/pman:5.0.0.a1...
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob 588423e31bcf skipped: already exists  
Copying blob 2068746827ec skipped: already exists  
Copying blob 001c52e26ad5 skipped: already exists  
Copying blob 00d40f20f0cf skipped: already exists  
Copying blob 4fef425a95a2 done   | 
Copying blob ecb6a3f01c0d skipped: already exists  
Copying blob 9daef329d350 skipped: already exists  
Copying blob 5d588b4f3b55 skipped: already exists  
Copying blob 8a335986117b skipped: already exists  
Copying blob c899aa7e431a done   | 
Copying blob 2f54527d4858 done   | 
Copying blob 9a63efe336e4 done   | 
Copying blob 334294c5c41a done   | 
Copying blob d9d4b9b6e964 skipped: already exists  
Copying config 10be2ce8f3 done   | 
Writing manifest to image destination
c3494f411bc898896b5822a614ec5532e189f4010239f032fac0640315477074
pman
b38f9a5bbe241f133b60304b3b762cb943b6f2bf1d5e8a5ed47d800d4f512ec6

2. Then, through few trials/looking at port mappings I tried to squeeze those ports through SSH to that remote laptop

ssh -L 8021:localhost:8021 -L 8020:localhost:8020 -L 8000:localhost:8000 ha@hopa-wired

3. Going to http://localhost:8020/ showed the pretty face of ChRIS but an attempt to login ended up with

There was a problem connecting to the server!

and few errors in console

so the question is how critical that no longer existing https://get.goxtk.com/xtk_edge.js ?

4. I stopped firewall on that laptop and tried to go directly to it, but it seems that for login frontend (?) is not taking current address but rather relies on localhost and thus we are having similar error?

[yarikoptic]

damn, just now saw that it is deprecated!!! we will try now the proper one!

[jennydaman]

@yarikoptic I'm happy to hear from you! Yes it's deprecated, please try out https://chrisproject.org/docs/run/podman

Our situation for Podman support is somewhat on-off. Docker and Kubernetes are much better supported. Using Podman you'll get an outdated version of ChRIS but everything should still work.

[jennydaman]

@yarikoptic I take it back! Don't look at https://chrisproject.org/docs/run/podman (the page itself says "DANGER")

Please checkout this repo https://github.com/FNNDSC/miniChRIS-podman and run ./minichris.sh up

[yarikoptic]

Thank you for guidance @jennydaman !

One of the motivations to try ChRIS was that it bundles Orthanc which we thought to deploy with "export" and MWL plugins. But with minichris.sh up goodness it seems to be gone. You stopped relying on it in favor of some home-brewed solution? I wonder on the reasons/motivations to switch away?

[jennydaman]

@yarikoptic trust me, I tried really hard to get things working without wrapper scripts. I hate bash*. But, the three upstream solutions (KinD, podman kube play, and podman-compose) have severe various limitations and drawbacks. We discussed this at the Podman community meeting of June 2023: https://chrisproject.org/blog/2023/06/06/chris-at-podman-community-meeting

• Blocking issue with podman-compose: Support depends_on type service_completed_successfully containers/podman-compose#575
• Blocking issue with podman kube play: Parallel pod creation with podman kube play containers/podman#24096
  • Also, podman kube play supports only a subset of Kubernetes, it doesn't support StatefulSet which would be very useful.
• KinD support for podman is experimental, and the overhead of running Kubernetes is big.
• ChRIS needs to be able to create its own containers. This is achieved by mounting the Podman socket, see https://github.com/FNNDSC/miniChRIS-podman/blob/091f4b2bb2f74ce89594fcb67870a39c06a05440/podman/pfcon-podman.yml#L85-L92
  • A potential solution is Podman in Podman, however it is complicated and I have not gotten to it.

The problem, as always, is limited time and resources. The scope of miniChRIS-podman and miniChRIS-docker are that they are for demo purposes only. The only production setup we support is Kubernetes or OpenShift using Helm, see https://chrisproject.org/docs/run. Furthermore, I say with regret that my own efforts have been shifted to focus on internal use-cases of ChRIS and away from supporting ChRIS usage in the external community. Of course, you can persuade @rudolphpienaar to jiggle my priorities if better podman support is important to you.

Note: you can also use Podman Quadlet.

git clone https://github.com/FNNDSC/miniChRIS-podman.git
./miniChRIS-podman.sh cat > ~/.config/containers/systemd/minichris-aio.yml
cp ./miniChRIS-podman/podman/quadlet/minichris.kube ~/.config/containers/systemd
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user start minichris

*footnote: I hate bash, when I write bash scripts I aim to be short and legible. For example, ./minichris.sh cat simply runs:

cat ./podman/kube/*.yml
sed "s#/run/user/1000/podman/podman.sock#$(podman info --format '{{ .Host.RemoteSocket.Path }}')#" ./podman/pfcon-podman.yml

p.s. I am an unofficial maintainer of using Podman Quadlet to run NextCloud, which I do as a hobby. As such, I am quite familiar with the limitations of Podman, yet still a big supporter of it.

[yarikoptic]

Hi @jennydaman , thanks for all the details and pointers. They do answer some of the questions I had in mind but didn't ask (yet), so that's great! Lots to learn!

I was wondering though specifically about orthanc -- do you still use it or why it is not bundled within that minichris.sh up?

[jennydaman]

No particular reason, ChRIS doesn’t need Orthanc to work. Orthanc just helps to demo one feature of ChRIS (PACS integration).

./minichris.sh simply wraps podman kube play, which doesn’t have any feature which makes it easy to include or exclude optional components like how docker compose profiles works. I’d have to write some more bash glue.