Is podman-remote-windows broken?

[towe75]

Is this a BUG REPORT or FEATURE REQUEST? (leave only one on its own line)

/kind bug

Description

I'd like to use podman-remote-windows to interact with podman on my linux boxes. Ultimately i'd like to be able to use/debug/improve vscode integration.

For sure there are not many users on this platform (yet) but the experience for first time users is relatively bad because of terse documentation. I am willing to help testing and to submitting PR's, if appropriate, in order to improve the situation on windows.

Steps to reproduce the issue:

1. Download zip file for podman-remote-windows from the release page

2. Unpack zip and try to run the executable

3. For podman release 1.9.2 i get simply this:

podman-remote-windows.exe version

time="2020-06-10T18:59:50+02:00" level=error msg="error validating engine configs: static directory must be an absolute path - instead got \"\\\\var\\\\lib\\\\containers\\\\storage\\\\libpod\""

4. Going back to 1.8.1 yields:

podman-remote-windows.exe version

time="2020-06-10T18:59:41+02:00" level=error msg="failed to setup podman build flags: failed to get container config: error validating engine configs: static directory must be an absolute path - instead got \"\\\\var\\\\lib\\\\containers\\\\storage\\\\libpod\""
Error: could not get runtime: dial unix /run/podman/io.podman: connect: A socket operation encountered a dead network.

Describe the results you received:

I can not use the remote command at all.

Additional information you deem important (e.g. issue happens only occasionally):

Results when running podman-remote-windows.exe from the zip files and from msi setups are similar.

Output of podman info --debug:

Same like above, it does not print the info just the same errors.

Additional environment details (AWS, VirtualBox, physical, etc.):

Windows 10.0.18363, running podman-remote-windows.exe in a plain cmd.exe shell.

[mheon]

@jwhonce @baude PTAL - I think these are fixed for remote v2.0?

[towe75]

@mheon i was to lazy to build a windows exe for 2.0 yet but i can do so if it helps.

[towe75]

I ran a build from master and i get indeed a very different result now:

podman-remote-windows.exe --log-level debug --identity \Users\xxxxxx\.ssh\id_rsa  --url ssh://[email protected]/run/podman/podman.sock?secure=True ps

time="2020-06-11T15:37:23+02:00" level=info msg="podman-remote-windows.exe filtering at log level debug"
time="2020-06-11T15:37:23+02:00" level=debug msg="Called podman-remote-windows.exe.PersistentPreRunE(podman-remote-windows.exe --log-level debug --identity \\Users\\xxxxx\\.ssh\\id_rsa --url ssh://[email protected]/run/podman/podman.sock?secure=True -r ps)"
Error: Failed to create sshClient: Connection to bastion host (ssh://[email protected]/run/podman/podman.sock?secure=True) failed.: ssh: handshake failed: ssh: host key mismatch

Clearly an improvement. But it's still unclear which ssh config directory is used. Connecting to the machine with ssh.exe and the given key works. There is a known_hosts entry for this host in my (windows) .ssh folder.

Moreover i do not understand if i should use -r/--remote and --url or if i could use a profile definition in a toml configuration file like it was documented for older versions. Can you clearify?

[mheon]

@jwhonce PTAL

[github-actions]

A friendly reminder that this issue had no activity for 30 days.

[rhatdan]

@ashley-cui PTAL

[baude]

https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-clients-macos-windows

[baude]

this should now be fixed, ive also provided a brief how to