rootless podman ftw.
Damn straight. Yes, docker has rootless now, although I rarely see it in the wild (as I’m converting it to rootless podman), no one seems to care or know. I was using user level quadlets (really like the syntax and structure) before that, and you get SELinux as well. Everything that doesn’t really need it should not have root, pretty much the basic level of Linux (back to Unix) security and Docker is like, ‘Don’t Care, Got Root ;)’.
principle of least privilege
That’s the one.
I’ve been converting my entire docker stack to rootless. You run into a number of issues where certain applications simply cannot handle having that limited access, especially on smaller or more niche projects. The documentation doesn’t offer solutions so you are just shit out of luck unless you can troubleshoot it.
This isn’t a docker issue but an issue of running a non-deterministic process on the host system. If you must run an LLM run it inside a docker container.
This is the exact trap with agents, they will use whatever privilege is lying around, they don’t stop and think ‘should I?’ like a person might. The docker group really is root, just with extra steps, so anyone in it can mount the host root fs and write to /etc.
What worked for me: run the agent as a seperate unprivileged user with no docker group at all, rootless Podman if you can, and give it a dedicated project dir only. Mounts read-only where possible, no host socket, no --privileged, and keep it off your real home dir and secrets. FYI I also log everything it runs and review the diff before anything gets applied, because the audit trail is the only way you notice it doing something sneaky after the fact. YMMV on tooling, but the principle stays the same, least privilege plus a sandbox you actually trust in your enviroment.
I am running most of my agents in https://git.jeena.net/jeena/agent-container but every now and then I want it to be able to fix something globally for me and be able to test it.
Running LLM on a server? Sounds like a recipe for disaster. What for?
The docker group is root access
This is really nothing new and every docker installation guide mentions this
