virter vm commit error: "cannot open /etc/machine-id for writing: Permission denied"

[mmguero]

Apologies if I'm missing something, I can't really find any examples or documentation on this.

I have a virter VM provisioned and running that I'd like to commit to an image. According to the virter vm commit --help the syntax should be:

  virter vm commit vm-name image-name

However, when I attempt this:

$ virter vm commit malcolm-191 malcolm-ready
INFO[0000] malcolm-191 err: truncate: cannot open '/etc/machine-id' for writing: Permission denied 
FATA[0000] Process exited with status 1                 

This is a debian-12 based image.

[mmguero]

Hmmm... I wonder if the issue might be that when I ran virter vm run I used --user debian. Is there a way to override the user that was selected during the run stage when I try to do the commit?

[mmguero]

What do you think about this: if this line fails, retry with sudo before giving up? Something like:

		// Starting the VM creates a machine ID.
		// We want these IDs to be unique, so reset to empty.
		err = v.VMExecShell(
			ctx, []string{vmName},
			&ProvisionShellStep{Script: "truncate -c -s 0 /etc/machine-id"})
		if err != nil {
			err = v.VMExecShell(
				ctx, []string{vmName},
				&ProvisionShellStep{Script: "sudo truncate -c -s 0 /etc/machine-id"})
			if err != nil {
				return err
			}
		}

[JoelColledge]

Hmmm... I wonder if the issue might be that when I ran virter vm run I used --user debian. Is there a way to override the user that was selected during the run stage when I try to do the commit?

Sounds like a plausible explanation. The --user flag was introduced to allow the user to be set to "Administrator" for Windows VMs. It seems your usage of the flag hasn't been covered yet.

The simplest solution is just to create the VM without the --user flag and do everything in the VM as root.

You could also do the truncate -c -s 0 /etc/machine-id step yourself, e.g. using sudo, and then run virter vm commit --reset-machine-id=false ....

retry with sudo before giving up?

That's a change we could consider, yes.

[mmguero]

Thanks for the explanation. I'll prepare a PR for my suggested change.

[JoelColledge]

Fixed by #31.