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I have a number of LXC containers (ubuntu template) which all have their own separate APT caches.

/var/lib/lxc/*/rootfs/var/cache/apt/archives/

I would like to have these linked to the host machines APT cache at:

/var/cache/apt/archives

From what I remember, symlinking out of a chroot jail is a massive no-no, so I was wondering what some other clean alternatives would be. One solution I thought of what just making a cron job on the host machine to sync with the guest containers, but I was wondering if there was any way I could handle this without having to schedule synchronizations? A symlink would just be so convenient, but it'd be a massive security hole, right?

Thanks, guys.

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You can use bind mounts to make these all point to the same place. For example:

mount --bind /var/cache/apt/archives /var/lib/lxc/foo/rootfs/var/cache/apt/archives

This blog post and this forum post talks about this solution in more detail.

A symlink wouldn't be a security hole, it simply wouldn't work, because from within the container a symlink to /var/cache/apt/archives would point at a location inside the container filesystem.

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    Thanks for the tip! I eventually realized that the various nodes could possibly interfere with each other during simultaneous apt-get operations, so I went off searching again. I ended up coming across apt-cacher-ng which I'm going to give a test run. Your solution is working though in the short term as I only perform apt operations on the nodes manually at present. Cheers :)
    – Adam Eberlin
    Aug 18, 2012 at 16:09

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