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# Remote image servers

The `incus` CLI command comes pre-configured with the following default remote image servers:

`images:`

  This server provides unofficial images for a variety of Linux distributions. The images are maintained by the Linux Containers team and are built to be compact and minimal.

  See `images.linuxcontainers.org` for an overview of available images.

## Remote server types

Incus supports the following types of remote image servers:

Simple streams servers

  Pure image servers that use the simple streams format. The default image servers are simple streams servers.

Public Incus servers

  Incus servers that are used solely to serve images and do not run instances themselves.

  To make an Incus server publicly available over the network on port 8443, set the `core.https_address` configuration option to `:8443` and do not configure any authentication methods (see How to expose Incus to the network for more information). Then set the images that you want to share to `public`.

Incus servers

  Regular Incus servers that you can manage over a network, and that can also be used as image servers.

  For security reasons, you should restrict the access to the remote API and configure an authentication method to control access. See How to expose Incus to the network and Remote API authentication for more information.