Question: ways to ignore disposable LXC containers?

[elboulangero]

Hello,

we have a machine, it is a autopkgtest worker. Meaning that this machine is constantly testing packages in throwaway LXC containers. There's always around 10 LXC containers up.

These are disposable containers: they are created, then within the container we run apt to update and install the packages required, then we run the tests, then we dispose of the container.

Our issue is that we run needrestart on the host once a day, and everytime needrestart runs, it picks some items within the LXC containers, and notify us that we should restart those containers. Of course, for our case it doesn't make sense, since those containers will be destroyed in a few minutes.

Question: how can I make needrestart ignore those LXC containers? I'm playing with the needrestart.conf file right now, but so far I didn't find the solution.

Thanks in advance!

[elboulangero]

I found a Debian ticket with a similar need, but different approach: https://bugs.debian.org/889552

In this ticket, Paul suggests to ignore processes that are too young. That would also work for my use-case, I suppose. The advantage of this approach it that it's not limited to LXC containers, it would also work for chroots.

[liske]

Would an option to disable container scanning or ignore containers by name patterns would help?

[elboulangero]

Hello! Yes, ignoring containers by name patterns would help. Our disposable lxc containers are named ci-017-222a371c for example, so I would be happy if I could ignore containers named ^ci-.*.