Create a dummy interface inside a Windows container

Question

I am trying to isolate the networking inside a Windows container, which is very easy using --network none.

The problem comes when I have two threads in the same process trying to communicate each other using multicast through a network interface, so this is the reason why I need to create an interface inside the container. The objetive of using network isolation is to avoid sending noise to the same process running in parallel inside another container.

So in other words, I need the equivalent to these commands in Windows:

ip link add dummy0 type dummy
ip addr add 10.0.0.1/24 dev dummy0
ip link set dev dummy0 multicast on
ip link set dummy0 up

I haven't found a tool to create network adapters on Windows so far.

Answer 1

This is an interesting use case. By default, Windows containers use the NAT network. I think your case would benefit from using some overlay. That way, you can have multiple networks and direct IP addresses from each network to each container. Does that helps? There are more details here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/container-networking/network-drivers-topologies