Is LXC in Cloudmin dead?

The latest Debian based image available in Cloudmin Settings -> New System Images seems to be Ubuntu 16.

The Debian Jessie one gives:

Downloading *Debian Jessie 64-bit LXC container with base OS* version 1.0 .. .. download of information file failed : HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

I accessed the page it downloads from and the image is there. I manually imported it and that gives an error when trying to start it:

Starting up test.box ... .. failed : lxc-start: test.box: confile.c: set_config_net: 288 lxc.net must not have a value lxc-start: test.box: parse.c: lxc_file_for_each_line_mmap: 142 Failed to parse config file "/var/lib/lxc/test.box/config" at line "lxc.network.type = veth" Failed to load config for test.box lxc-start: test.box: tools/lxc_start.c: main: 263 Failed to create lxc_container

Not sure about Debian but Ubuntu is moving away from LXC and using the LXD snap version instead(as of 18.04). Much simpler to install and manage via command line but cloudmin doesn’t know the commands or the paths. And it seems there’s not much interest in LXC or LXD, but I love it. I have one page of commands setup in webmin to administer most daily things. Once the LXD VM is setup, it can be added to cloudmin just like any other physical server. Which is what I do.

I can manually manage containers, it’s just convenient having cloudmin start one for me as it handles DNS records, allocates an available IP and adds it to cloudmin all in one go.

If it’s broken, why leave it in there? I mean, webmin is great and cloudmin is really good for KVM/Xen but the container part isn’t really doing it any favors.

I think it probably does need to be removed. It’s too fractured across distributions (LXD is only common on Ubuntu/Debian, LXC has changed in incompatible ways a couple times and is mostly unmaintained). All around it just isn’t a great target, as we don’t have the development resources to understand all the differences. Honestly, I’d rather it were more popular and more coherent and better maintained across distros, as I prefer it to most options, but it’s just not and doesn’t seem to be getting more popular or more widely supported.

We’re so short on time and resources that we really have to think hard about anything that requires a lot of extra time for a very small userbase, and LXC/LXD is pretty much the poster child for that combination of traits.