Explicitly set container MAC address when launched by container service plugin

[Alexander Bartnik]

Hello,

I have several analyses I need to use in my XNAT system (1.8.1) that use matlab. Our lab uses a matlab license provided by our academic institution, so we're unable to use the official matlab docker since that requires a cloud license. We've been able to get around this for dockerized versions of our analyses in the past by passing the MAC address of the host via the docker run command (i.e. docker run --mac-address=XX:XX:XX:XX:XX analysis). This is because matlab licenses check the MAC address of the system that it's running on.

I've tried setting some of these analyses up in XNAT using the container service plugin (3.0.0), but I'm not able to use anything from matlab since it looks for our host's MAC address and the container's MAC address varies.

Is there any way to pass the --mac-address argument to containers run via the container service plugin? I could also try a docker-in-docker approach, but that would require passing /var/run/docker.sock from the host, which I don't believe is possible with the container service plugin either.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciate, thanks in advance!

[kel...@wustl.edu]

Hello,

Unfortunately, XNAT Container Service doesn't currently support setting the MAC address of containers it launches.  

Another approach, that we've used here for cluster processing, is to compile our Matlab functions and run them using the Matlab Runtime. A version matched Matlab Runtime can be installed on a Docker image and will support running your compiled code without needing access to the license server.

See:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/compiler/package-matlab-standalone-applications-into-docker-images.html

and

https://github.com/demartis/matlab_runtime_docker

for guidance.

Best,

Matt

[Alexander Bartnik]

Makes sense, I'll look into those thanks!