Bug 1241311

Summary: RFE: Don't assume qemu:///session is always local, and fix defaults
Product: [Community] Virtualization Tools Reporter: Spencer Baugh <sbaugh>
Component: virt-managerAssignee: Cole Robinson <crobinso>
Status: CLOSED DEFERRED QA Contact:
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Version: unspecifiedCC: berrange, crobinso, gscrivan
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Last Closed: 2020-01-26 18:20:46 UTC Type: Bug
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Description Spencer Baugh 2015-07-09 01:00:32 UTC 
Description of problem:
Can't remotely connect to qemu:///session instances (which is normally
possible with virsh with URLs like
"qemu+ssh://hostname/session?socket=path") because one can't enter
such a URL in the UI.

Manually hacking in the URI with dconf seems to mostly work, but (for
example) I quickly encountered a bug when creating a VM where
virt-manager assumed the only usable storage pool was my *local*
homedir instead of the remote homedir.

virsh and other tools support these connections just fine.

Some justification of why this is useful:
The reason I want to remotely connect to a QEMU session instance is
because with qemu-bridge-helper giving unprivileged access to bridges,
if one also does chmod 666 /dev/kvm, QEMU session instances actually
become quite useful. You can run actual production VMs with them.

Specifically, I want to use them as a way to roll out a virtual
machine service for all the students at my university: Just give them
a shell account, set some ulimits and tell them how to make a
session-mode vm. (I know, there are some flaws in my ability to really
do limits here, but it's enough for my use case). If they were able to
use virt-manager instead of virsh to manage those VMs, it would sure
make it easier for them... and I think there are a lot of this kind of
use case that are enabled by the existence of qemu-bridge-helper.
Comment 1 Cole Robinson 2015-09-05 21:38:05 UTC 
For the 'Add Connection' wizard, I don't want to add any UI to support this explicitly since as you mention in the email thread this isn't really a common libvirt use case and it doesn't seem to be supported well (for example there's no autodaemon launching)

https://www.redhat.com/archives/virt-tools-list/2015-July/msg00033.html

But you can do get this in an easier way than hacking dconf: just launch virt-manager --connect $YOUR-URI and it will be saved permanently to the URI list.

We can use this bug to track the other issue you report, that we assume session URIs always == local. There's likely a few issues like that lingering around
Comment 2 Cole Robinson 2020-01-26 18:20:46 UTC 
I'm open to tweaking virt-manager to not choke on this case, but given current resources and the niche nature of this usecase, I don't expect it to be implemented.
However if someone shows up with patches I will be happy to review and test them. Closing as DEFERRED