Kasm Workspaces: Rolling Images, Persistent Storage, Session Time (Episode 4)

hey guys in this video we're going to kind of continue our Chasm workspaces uh video series and we're going to take a look at three specific topics so the first thing we're going to take a look at is something called rolling images basically you can think of that as nightly updates to the containers that are available in your workspaces setup the second thing we're going to take a look at is something called persistent storage that will allow us to say set up a desktop environment in one of our workspaces and then close out that desktop environment but still be able to go back to it later and kind of pick up where we left off the third area that we're going to cover in this video is session timeout Now by default the sessions aren't very long so I want to show you how you can change that to to make your sessions just last as long as you'd like them to last but before we get into all of that of course I've got some bills to pay so here's a quick message from today's video sponsor this 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what you can do with lenode but with that said let's jump over to my desktop and take a look at rolling images and so I can show you how you can fix a problem that you may have already encountered okay so here we are we're logged into the admin area of Chasm and I want to demonstrate something first before I show you how to switch to Rolling images so if we come over to our workspaces tab up here at the top and then come over and click on let's say Discord uh we're going to leave this in our well let's it doesn't matter we're just open this however you'd like to open it but when I click this it's going to load our Discord instance so once it finally loads we're going to see that there's this this message up here that says hey today must be your lucky day there's an update available and it it doesn't matter which of these you click nothing fixes it so that kind of makes in this case Discord completely unusable so let me show you how you can fix this issue first thing I want to do is come back over here and go back to my desktop I'm just going to delete this session doesn't matter so we're gonna go back to admin and then we want to come over here to where it says workspaces we're going to click there and we're going to we're just going to open this up and scroll down to Discord and right here we can see Discord is running as a container it's enabled and right here is the uh the the docker image that we're using currently for our Chasm workspaces setup so it seems like this should be fine however Discord releases updates all of the time and this particular version may be outdated and in fact we know it's outdated because we couldn't even log into our our account so here's what we can do we're going to come over to the far right we're going to click on edit and while we're here I'm going to show you a couple of things like you can change the name so if you wanted to be clever you could you know you could change your friendly name what it shows up as on your dashboard you can change the description you can change the thumbnail you can modify and customize this basically however you want to fit your aesthetic or or your your workflow whatever you can modify a lot of this stuff and that's actually kind of what we're going to do here if we come down we can see that our Docker image Chasm web slash Discord uh and then version 1.12.0 now we know that that doesn't work as as we saw a moment ago so what we're going to do is head over here to hub.doctor.com web slash Discord and if we scroll down a little bit here we can see current tags uh 1.12.0 that's the one we're on however we can see right here is 1.12.0 Dash rolling and it says rolling tags are images that are updated and built nightly to ensure your images are running the latest version so that's what we're going to do I'm going to scroll back up to the top I just want to make sure I don't screw this up but I'm just going to grab that right there and copy it and press Ctrl C on my keyboard and we're just going to swap out like that and then we're going to scroll down to the very bottom and click submit and then we can come back to our workspaces and let's see oops so right here it says no resources are available and that's because it is downloading the newest version that rolling version of Discord so what we need to do is just kind of hang out give it a minute to run its update and then we'll come back and take a look a few moments later okay so here we are just a couple of minutes later and we're going to come back over to our dashboard and click on our Discord button or tab or whatever you want to call it there and click launch session and this time it actually seems to be loading so that's a good and here we go it ran some updates it's starting give this just a second and just like that now we're able to get logged in uh we're gonna give this a second I'm just going to log into my account so you can actually see it working so of course I'm going to use the QR code scanner option on my phone I'm going to say yes I'm trying to log in there so here we are we're using Discord now it's actually up and running and all we had to do was change our Docker image inside Chasm to be the rolling version to make sure that it's continuously updating anytime there's a new update available to The Container so something I wanted to kind of add to that is you can append all of the different images or workspaces that are in here with that Dash rolling to make sure that you've always got the most current version of the container that's available however you may run into issues with that and you may not want to do that with certain containers I think that's depending on your your needs your setup your workflow you may want to play with that Dash rolling on the on the tag for the container you're trying to use just to see what the best option is for your particular setup foreign images let's take a look at persistent storage and first let me demonstrate kind of uh what we're currently working with so if we come over to our our workspaces dashboard here I'm going to open up Ubuntu focal just going to click that I'm going to let it open in a current session or a current tab that's fine um and then I think what I want to do is just open up Firefox I'm going to type in cat pictures and um yeah I think um sure let's let's grab this guy right here we're gonna right click we're gonna say um save image as we're gonna put it in pictures that seems like a reasonable expectation and click save cool so now I'm going to close my my Firefox uh browser window here inside oops let's delete that and then what I want to do is come over here to downloads or come over to Chasm user we'll go to pictures and hey look there's the picture of the cat we just downloaded I can open that up like so we'll give this a second there we go and there's the picture that we downloaded so we know that that is there now of course if I close all of this and I come over and I delete my session and delete my session right and then open this back up and say launch session that's fine give this a second again and of course uh we'll close that we'll go to our downloads if I can double click Chasm user pictures not there so that just tells us once our once we've deleted our session that's gone all of the data with it is gone so let me show you how you can have a persistent setup so that you can download pictures and files and configure your dash your desktop however you'd like to configure it and and even if you delete your session come back to it later so what we're going to do is we're going to close this we're going to we're going to delete our session here and click delete and then what we'll do is we'll come back over to admin we'll go to workspaces down here on the left side and then we're going to do we're going to scroll down there's a specific one I'm looking for it's this one that's the Ubuntu focal that we were just working with this is the one that's enabled um and of course uh what we're going to do is come over to the right we're going to click edit and then we're going to scroll up until we find this spot that says persistent profile path and we're going to fill in some information there it's just it's a path where you want your profiles to be stored now something to keep in mind with this is that if you plan on saving large files you will want to make sure that your hard drive can support it wherever you put your persistent path make sure that there is plenty of space on that drive that's going to be super important to make sure that you don't overload that hard drive fill it up and then make it so that you can't access your stuff so wherever you store this again make sure that there's plenty of hard drive space there especially if you're going to have multiple users on your setup so what we're going to do is we're going to come back over here to where it says persistent profile path and I'm just going to put in home slash persistence slash profiles slash Ubuntu underscore vocal and then this curly brace username curly brace that is uh that's basically a variable so that whoever is logging in they will each have their own persistent path for this instance and basically what that means is if you've got you know say three users on here that are all going to log in to to a Ubuntu focal each one will have their own separate profiles so if you do something to yours it won't affect anyone else you could I guess if you wanted to you know delete the curly braces and everything would get stored there however from a practicality and usability standpoint not a good idea so we're going to put those curly braces back in there to make sure that it represents a variable that will automatically populate the username of the person logging in and using this particular workspace so once we've got this we can scroll down and click submit just like so just that easily now we can go back to our workspaces again we're going to select Ubuntu focal and here now we've got this new Option where it says persistent profile by default it is enabled however you can enable it disable it or reset it if you wanted to do that um you know so basically if you if you leave those unenabled every time you log in you'll log into the same workspace with all of your files and folders and all of that stuff ready to go for you if you switch it to disabled it's just going to spin up a temporary incidence so that you know even if you've got a persistent storage you can go to disabled persistent storage do your thing delete it and then it's like it never happened and then with this reset you should be able to then to reset your persistent storage back to basically day one with none of your files available to it so we're going to go ahead and leave this as enabled current tab is fine I'm gonna give this a second again we're gonna go ahead and close this uh we're gonna go back we're going to open uh Firefox again we're going to type in a cat pictures again and then um let's let's pick a different one let's let's pick this guy uh we're going to uh save the image as again we're gonna go to pictures because again I just figured that's the best place to store that and there we go let's let's for the sake of it uh let's grab this guy as well we're gonna right click save image as again same location I actually appreciate it that it remembered I wanted that to be in pictures but I'm gonna click save just like so now I'm going to close Firefox I'm gonna go to downloads I'm going to go over here to Chasm user and pictures and right there are the two cat pictures we just downloaded so next I'm going to close this I'm going to close that and then I'm going to come over here and delete the session entirely and then we're going to go ahead and click this again we're going to leave persistent profile enabled and click launch session we'll give it just a second to load up here again we'll close that we'll open this up I know I could create a shortcut for pictures but I'm lazy so again we're gonna go to pictures and hey look our cat pictures are still there showing that this actually does work the way we want it to now what I want to do is actually close this like so we're going to delete this section entirely just like we did before we're going to open this up again but what we want to do is actually switch this to disabled current tab perfectly fine and then come over to here go to downloads Chasm user pictures and there's nothing there okay so that means that we're not using that persistent profile that we were using a moment ago this is a completely separate instance so let's let's close this let's come over to here delete our session delete our session go to Ubuntu focal desktop we're going to do enabled for a persistent profile again launch our session minimize uh uploads whatever doesn't matter pictures hey look our cats are back so that just kind of shows how um the persistent versus non-persistent storage works with these different workspaces you you can set up a persistent profile but you don't always have to use it you can toggle back and forth depending on what your goal is for that particular session okay so the next thing we want to take a look at is changing the default session time and by default it's set to an hour and that may not always be appropriate that may not always be reasonable so if we if we go ahead and just minimize this or come over here we're going to click on workspaces and right here we can see that it expires in 59 minutes so about an hour so what we're going to do is we're actually just going to delete this session it doesn't matter that we were on our persistent storage session so it doesn't matter what we do there uh what we'll do next is come over to the admin area we're going to go back to workspaces over here in the left hand side and then we're going to scroll down uh to to do this one right here I believe let me make sure that's the one and then we're going to do edit and then we're going to come right here where it says session time limit in seconds um I have mixed feelings on seconds there um because let's say you wanted to make it I don't know let's say you wanted to make your session last a year I don't know why you would but you could uh we're just going to put in uh you know three million 153 000 no 31 million five hundred thirty six thousand seconds there that's a lot it doesn't matter ultimately but we're going to go ahead and click submit right there and then we'll come back to our workspaces we're going to go ahead and just open this back up and we'll click enable dissolve fine this is all good we'll click launch session and here now we get this banner across the bottom I have mixed feelings on that uh that should actually have a three in front of it that kind of shows how unrealistic setting this for a year is but if we come over and uh go to workspaces again uh right here we can see that we've got a 364 days 23 hours so you can change your your session time limits on a workspace by workspace basis you know maybe you want you know eight hours 12 hours whatever I think those are much more realistic um but but you can absolutely go in on each of your different um on your each of your different workspaces and configure how long you'd like the default session time limit to be so that's how easy it is to change the default time limit on any of your different workspaces of course you can go in and configure uh probably much shorter sessions than I demonstrated here at a year but you can go through each of your different workspaces and configure that time limit uh in seconds on on each of your workspaces independently of each other uh we talked about persistent storage on a workspace by workspace basis I think I think I only showed one instance there where I had Ubuntu underscore focal in that path you would want to change that to represent each of the different workspaces that you're setting up a persistent storage path for I apologize for not showing that but that you would want to change that Ubuntu underscore focal and switch that out with the actual workspace name when you set up the persistent storage for each of your different workspaces we also talked about rolling images which gives us the opportunity to make sure that we've got the most current updates to that container whenever we deploy it so hopefully you found this video helpful informative whatever uh words you want to use there and if you did do me a favor give the video a thumbs up that really does help quite a bit and of course if you've got questions or comments or anything like that definitely leave those in the comment section down below but I think with all of that said I'm gonna go ahead and wrap this up I do want to thank you guys for spending a few minutes of your day with me today and I'll talk to you in the next video

Channel: DB Tech

Views: 11,410

Keywords: DB Tech, DBTech, Kasm Workspaces, Kasm Workspaces Rolling Images, Kasm Workspaces Persistent Storage, Kasm Workspaces Session Time, Kasm Workspaces get container updates, Kasm Workspaces set up Persistent Storage, Kasm Workspaces change Session Time, kasm workspaces, kasm discord, kasm web discord, fix discord on kasm, fix discord on kasm web

Id: ioJla7aLfoQ

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 07 2023