I am looking for the article to introduce the container network since I met many problem when deploy my kubernetes cluster. After I detected many blogs and books I found a way to config your docker network manually on linux os, I’d like share this here, hopes that can help who are looking for.

Before we share the way that to detect or config the docker network, firstly, let me lead you to take a look at the linux network namespace and its command ip. ip is a powerful tool of network configuration on linux, it can not only do what the traditional tool e.g. ifconfig, route, iptales do, but it can config the network namepace.

operation the network namespace via ip netns

• create a namespace:

edward@fresky:~# sudo ip netns add test1

• list the namespaces

edward@freesky:~# sudo ip netns list
test1

• delete a namespaces

edward@freesky:~# sudo ip netns delete test1

• execute a command inner namespace

edward@freesky:~# sudo ip netns exec test1 ip link

You may notice that we can do almost everything related linux namespace you want with ip netns, now one question come up, can we use it as docker network config tool? the answer is yes.

However, there are several proparing things should be finished before we can use it as the docker network tool. that because the the ip netns will search the namespace under the path /var/run/netns that is not the docker work folder. we mush map the docker network namespace to the ip netns work directory.

• find the process id of the docker instance running

edward@freesky:~# sudo docker inspect --format '' mycontainer 
3243

• link to ip netns directory

edward@freesky:~# sudo ln -s /proc/3243/ns/net /var/run/netns/mycontianer

if the directory /var/run/netns isn’t exsit, create it first: sudo mkdir -p /var/run/netns

• test

edward@freesky:~# sudo ip netns list
<container>

Now, all that is ready, you can use the ip netns to config the docker network as you expect. according to my experience, I’d like start a bash window for my work as follow:

edward@freesky:~# sudo ip netns exec mycontainer bash

quit the namespace bash via inputing ‘exit’ after all work is fine.

please mark label it is from freesky-edward’s blog if you plan to forward this blog, thanks a lot.