Podman no network connectivity between host machine and container on bridge network

I want to be able to ping my podman containers from the RHEL 8 host machine that's running them.

I created a podman bridged network with the 'podman network create' command.
The bridged network is 10.1.2.0/24 with a gateway of 10.1.2.1 and two container hosts on the network: 10.1.2.5 and 10.1.2.6.

From within either container, I am able to ping the other container as well as access the internet through the bridge. However, I cannot ping either container from the host machine. I tried creating a virtual bridge interface on the host machine and assigning the IP address of the bridged network's gateway to the virtual interface, but, this also didn't work. I am at a loss and can't find the answer. Thank you.

You cannot ping rootless containers from your host. Unlike containers started as root, rootless container don't have "real" network interfaces; they have software interfaces that are managed by the slirp4netns application.

The only way to provide inbound access to rootless containers is using port publishing. That is, if you're running a web server in a rootless container and you want to access it from your host, you run something like:

podman run -p 8080:80 myimage

Which would make a webserver running on port 80 inside the container available on host port 8080.

For example, if I start a container like this:

podman run --name webserver -d --rm docker.io/alpinelinux/darkhttpd

We see that podman has started the a corresponding slirp4nets process:

$ ps -fe |grep slirp4netns
lars       83079    3115  0 14:14 pts/2    00:00:00 /usr/bin/slirp4netns --disable-host-loopback --mtu=65520 --enable-sandbox --enable-seccomp --enable-ipv6 -c -e 3 -r 4 --netns-type=path /run/user/1000/netns/netns-c8c1a75a-f2fb-ed7e-5f4b-8bc15766d05d tap0

Inside the running container is a tap interface; that interface is connected to the slirp4netns process, which is responsible for forwarding traffic between the container and the host/outside world.