Is there no utility by which the operator might find out how much disk is being used by a collection of multipass images? The only way I have been able to view anything is to look at multipass list -vvvv and wade through reams of information looking for disk sizes.

For example, in docker:

me@mybox:~$ docker image ls
REPOSITORY                     TAG          IMAGE ID       CREATED             SIZE
alpine                         build        9443c4e84eaf   About an hour ago   1.03GB
alpine                         run          25a4aa8e91d7   4 hours ago         53.3MB
ubuntu23kde                    v1           d9ee676502df   4 days ago          2.88GB
ubuntudev                      qt642        939488404c95   7 days ago          1.2GB
alpine-container               v1           b2f8d4361b88   7 days ago          1.03GB
portnavigator/port-navigator   1.1.0        314caea26d7e   5 weeks ago         168MB
alpine                         latest       8ca4688f4f35   6 weeks ago         7.34MB
docker/disk-usage-extension    0.2.8        e2e81f16dc58   2 months ago        2.82MB

Is there no analog in multipass?

I'm trying to free up space on my root drive on my ubuntu system.

One thing that is consuming about 12G is multipass. I want to move it to the more spacious /home directory.

So I followed the instructions here and created the new directory /home/multipass.

However, I do multipass list and no instances are found. How do I get back my instances? Are there things I should be looking for in the journal that show why it's not working?

EDIT: requested details of what I have done:

root@homebuild:/var/snap/multipass# mkdir /home/multipass
root@homebuild:/var/snap/multipass# snap stop multipass
2023-10-11T13:55:54-04:00 INFO Waiting for "snap.multipass.multipassd.service" to stop.
Stopped.
root@homebuild:/var/snap/multipass# snap connect multipass:all-home
root@homebuild:/var/snap/multipass# mkdir /etc/systemd/system/snap.multipass.multipassd.service.d
root@homebuild:/var/snap/multipass# tee /etc/systemd/system/snap.multipass.multipassd.service.d/override.conf <<EOF
> [Service]
> Environment=MULTIPASS_STORAGE=/home/multipass
> EOF
[Service]
Environment=MULTIPASS_STORAGE=/home/multipass
root@homebuild:/var/snap/multipass# sudo cp -r /var/snap/multipass/common/data/multipassd /home/multipass/data
root@homebuild:/var/snap/multipass# sudo cp -r /var/snap/multipass/common/cache/multipassd /home/multipass/cache
root@homebuild:/var/snap/multipass/common/data# snap start multipass
Started.

# in other window
steves@homebuild:~$ multipass list
No instances found.

Not sure what else needs to be done? I think these are all the instructions in the link.

I try to mount a directory to an multipass ubuntu instance. But I get the error:

mount failed: source "<path_to_dir>" is not readable

The directory should has the correct mode: drwxrwxr-x@

On macOS Catalina.

Thanks for help.

Setup & Purpose

I use a headless Ubuntu server as VM host running a nextcloud appliance using multipass.

I want to access the VM from another Desktop System in the same network for testing.

• local hardware server running Ubuntu LTS 16.04
• machine reachable in local network over wired ethernet under IP 192.168.168.107 assigned via DHCP.
• Multipass 1.3.0 is installed and working using snap
• A Multipass instance is running Ubuntu Core 18 with the official nextcloud appliance
• guest VM is reachable only from the host system by ping via IP 10.252.236.79

There is a BigBlueButton install on the host using docker for greenlight that will show up in the network with its bridge as well but should not be relevant.

For my usecase to access the VM from Outside the host, bridging seemed to be the right way to go. Unfortunately there is almost no documentation how to set up bridging for multipass VMs except for Setups using Virtualbox and he Virtualbox bridging capabilities e.g. described for Windows. I also tried routing as described later.

I use the default Quemu virtualisation provider and it seems I need to stick with it.

I tried various approaches to setup a bridge or routing to the VM but cannot get it to work.

Setup

• the network we want to connect to: 10.252.236.0
• the subnet mask: /24
• the VM IP address: 10.252.236.79
• the IP through which we can reach the Host system server: 192.168.168.107
• the hardware network interface: enp7s0f0

Default Setup

route -n output::

Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
0.0.0.0         192.168.168.1   0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 enp7s0f0
10.252.236.0    0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 mpqemubr0
172.17.0.0      0.0.0.0         255.255.0.0     U     0      0        0 docker0
172.23.0.0      0.0.0.0         255.255.0.0     U     0      0        0 br-b874056c3ec6
192.168.168.0   0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     0      0        0 enp7s0f0

Bridging

I tried to find a reliable example, but cannot find something that applies to my setup.

Routing

I tried routing using on the host

sudo ip route add 10.252.236.0/24 via 192.168.168.220 dev enp7s0f0
sudo ip route add 10.252.236.79 via 192.168.168.220 dev enp7s0f0

where 192.168.168.220 should be the IP to reach through.

Until I revoke this, I cannot reach the VM anymore under 10.252.236.79

I've just been trying out Multipass and can see great value in using it for training and testing. Unfortunately with the small SSD I use as the root volume in my server it quickly ran out of space.

I can't seem to locate the path where the disks are stored and it doesn't appear to be configurable. Is there a nice way to use a custom path for VM storage and image storage?