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ChromeOS 68.0.3440.4 Brings Hostname Resolution to Project Crostini

K

ChromeOS 68.0.3440.4 was released a few hours ago and it seems like a small update, likely heavy on under the hood bug fixes but very light on changes as far as I can tell after playing with it for a few hours. Here are all of the changes I could find:

Disclaimer: This Page Has Been Archived

Please note that this blog post has been archived and may contain information that is outdated, defunct, or covers topics that are no longer of interest. It is being kept available solely for reference purposes, in case others might find portions of it useful.

For more recent and up-to-date tutorials, I recommend visiting KMyers.me or other websites that specialize in the topic you are interested in. It is always advisable to seek the most current information to ensure accuracy and relevance.

Hostname Resolution

As pointed out by reddit user “smiller171“, you can now address your Linux Environment via hostname by simply using “linuxhost”. This will be a welcomed change for web developers who want to develop and test their code without needing to dig up the IP Address of the Virtual Machine. You can now simply type http://linuxhost/ in your browser if you have a web server installed in your Crostini instance. You can also specify a custom port if needed.

You can also ssh into “linuxhost” via the Chrome SSH application, mount the filesystem over ssh (not sure why) and more.

After testing this out, everything worked great except for one small problem – this is only accessible in ChromeOS so accessing a service from your Android Applications will not work

Hostname Resolution Within Containers

If you have multiple containers running on your ChromeOS device (via the “run_container.sh script) you can now use hostnames to access resources between containers. Here is an example setup from within crosh

vmc start termina run_container.sh --container_name=stretch --user=kmyers --shell

This will create a second container inside of your main Termina Virtual Machine and drop you into a terminal on that new container. You can now run “ssh @penguin” and you can now ssh into your main virtual machine from that container. This is useful for developers who may want to run MySQL on one container while putting a web application within a different container.

cros_termina Update

The ChromeOS Linux Terminal Application has gotten an update as well. This may need to be updated manually which simply requires you to enter “chrome://components/” in a new Chrome tab and select “Check for update” on “cros_termina”. This will take less than a minute in most cases.

Debian Package Updates

Although not directly part of the ChromeOS68.0.3440.4 upgrade, the following Google maintained Debian packages were also released today. You will need to run “sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade” inside of the terminal to perform this upgrade.

  • cros-garcon
  • cros-guest-tools
  • cros-sommelier
  • cros-ui-config