One afternoon, after manually killing a few jails and immediately restarting them, I decided to automate the process as much as possible, and I made the results available (under the BSD license) for public consumption. The resulting tool, JailAdmin, is a Perl module and frontend script that can start a named jail, stop one, or give a ps(1)-like process listing for a particular jail. It is used in production environments, although I offer no guarantees.

History

• • Moved much code from jailadmin to Jail.pm, making the command-line client much "thinner" than before. In the future, alternate frontends may be preferable to the current utility and this should make it much easier to develop them.
  • jail-snmp: Redirected STDERR to /dev/null to prevent some spurious errors whenever debugging is enabled.
  • jail-snmp-persist: Added a new persistent version of jail-snmp that runs with much less overhead than the older jail-snmp. Update your SNMP daemon's configuration to use this instead of jail-snmp if at all possible.

• • Jail.pm: Many changes and enhancements:
    • As mentioned above, Jail.pm can now use jls and jexec to interact with the jails and gather information about them. This is disabled by default for compatibility's sake, but should be enabled if you have access to these commands and don't experience problems with them.

• • Named groups! You can now execute jailadmin stop webservers to shutdown a whole list of jails without individually specifying each one.
  • Brought INSTALL and README current.

• • The ability to apply devfs rulesets to mounted /dev directories.
  • A configurable parallelized shutdown function (let 5 ports at a time "wait 10 seconds" simultaneously, for example). This can dramatically decrease the time required to reboot a set of jails.
  • A way to specify default options to apply to all jails.
  • The ability to specify a waiting period after mounting a filesystem (on a per-mountpoint basis). For example, some users had problems with a jail using mounts within NFS shares when those NFS shares don't become available instantaneously.
  • A new Makefile for easier installation and removal.
  • Submission to the FreeBSD ports collection, which will hopefully lead to more widespread adoption and enhancement.

To Do

• The SNMP extension really needs cleaning up. It's functional for now, and tests well locally, but it could really stand a few good refactorings.

• Add function read-write options to the SNMP extension, possibly allowing startup and shutdown of environments from network monitoring tools.
• Fix the JAIL-MIB data. Sheesh, it's kludged.

• Set ALLOWTOPICCHANGE = KirkStrauser

One afternoon, after manually killing a few jails and immediately restarting them, I decided to automate the process as much as possible, and I made the results available (under the BSD license) for public consumption. The resulting tool, JailAdmin, is a Perl module and frontend script that can start a named jail, stop one, or give a ps(1)-like process listing for a particular jail. It is used in production environments, although I offer no guarantees.

History

• 2004-04-02 - 1.6: Added several new important features:
  • The ability to apply devfs rulesets to mounted /dev directories.
  • A configurable parallelized shutdown function (let 5 ports at a time "wait 10 seconds" simultaneously, for example). This can dramatically decrease the time required to reboot a set of jails.

To Do

• Cleanly shut down a jail environment, i.e. by calling the appropriate rc.* scripts
• The SNMP extension really needs cleaning up. It's functional for now, and tests well locally, but it could really stand a few good refactorings.
• Give the SNMP extension the ability to run via 'pass-persist' to cut startup overhead when running on a closely-monitored system.

• Set ALLOWTOPICCHANGE = KirkStrauser

One afternoon, after manually killing a few jails and immediately restarting them, I decided to automate the process as much as possible, and I made the results available (under the BSD license) for public consumption. The resulting tool, JailAdmin, is a Perl module and frontend script that can start a named jail, stop one, or give a ps(1)-like process listing for a particular jail. It is used in production environments, although I offer no guarantees.

History

• 2002-12-04 - 1.5: Added a feature to automatically mount a list of filesystems before starting a jail, and to umount those filesystems (in reverse order) after stopping it. This is useful for environments where multiple jails share the same filesystem (i.e. /usr/ports/distfiles) but you don't want to have them permanently mounted.
• 2002-06-11 - 1.4: Important note: I changed the syntax of the jailadmin command to allow multiple arguments! Scripts using the old syntax will no longer work until you - at a minimum - reverse the order of the arguments. Added a `jail.sh' rc.d script for automatic jail start and stop at system boot and shutdown.
• 2002-05-18 - 1.3: Added the jail-snmp UCD-SNMP extension and related mib data

To Do

• Cleanly shut down a jail environment, i.e. by calling the appropriate rc.* scripts

• The SNMP extension really needs cleaning up. It's functional for now, and tests well locally, but it could really stand a few good refactorings.
• Give the SNMP extension the ability to run via 'pass-persist' to cut startup overhead when running on a closely-monitored system.
• Add function read-write options to the SNMP extension, possibly allowing startup and shutdown of environments from network monitoring tools.

One afternoon, after manually killing a few jails and immediately restarting them, I decided to automate the process as much as possible, and I made the results available (under the BSD license) for public consumption. The resulting tool, JailAdmin, is a Perl module and frontend script that can start a named jail, stop one, or give a ps(1)-like process listing for a particular jail. It is used in production environments, although I offer no guarantees.

• Add function read-write options to the SNMP extension, possibly allowing startup and shutdown of environments from network monitoring tools.
• Fix the JAIL-MIB data. Sheesh, it's kludged.

History

• 2002-06-11 - 1.4: Important note: I changed the syntax of the jailadmin command to allow multiple arguments! Scripts using the old syntax will no longer work until you - at a minimum - reverse the order of the arguments. Added a `jail.sh' rc.d script for automatic jail start and stop at system boot and shutdown.
• 2002-05-18 - 1.3: Added the jail-snmp UCD-SNMP extension and related mib data
• 2002-05-15 - 1.2: Massive re-write to modularize the code and provide rudimentary documentation.

• Add function read-write options to the SNMP extension, possibly allowing startup and shutdown of environments from network monitoring tools.
• Fix the JAIL-MIB data. Sheesh, it's kludged.

One afternoon, after manually killing a few jails and immediately restarting them, I decided to automate the process as much as possible, and I made the results available for public consumption. The resulting tool, Jailadmin, is a simple Perl script that can start a named jail, stop one, or give a ps(1)-like process listing for a particular jail. Don't get your hopes up; this really isn't a sophisticated system, although I have some fairly nice ideas for its future development. Still, I find it useful, and others may too.

One afternoon, after manually killing a few jails and immediately restarting them, I decided to automate the process as much as possible, and I made the results available for public consumption. The resulting tool, Jailadmin, is a simple Perl script that can start a named jail, stop one, or give a ps(1)-like process listing for a particular jail. Don't get your hopes up; this really isn't a sophisticated system, although I have some fairly nice ideas for its future development. Still, I find it useful, and others may too.