How to better update a jail host system

[Andrew Hotlab]

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Jon Passki" <jon.passki at hursk.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 25, 2007 5:48 AM
To: "Andrew Hotlab" <andrew.hotlab at hotmail.com>
Cc: "FreeBSD-Jail" <freebsd-jail at freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: How to better update a jail host system

> You can re-create your binary jail setup easily from sysinstall:
>
> sysinstall _ftpPath=ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
> nonInteractive=yes mediaSetFTP releaseName=6.2-RELEASE dists=base
> distSetCustom installRoot=/path/to/jail installCommit
>
> Then, the only thing you have to manage is packages.  With a patched
> freebsd-update [2], you can even update from 6.2 to 6.3.  If ezjail
> supports a binary tarball update, it would be trivial to take the
> output of the sysinstall and freebsd-update and roll one.
>

I had not ever considered using sysinstall(8) as an option to create jails: 
it sounds good, expecially to a sysadmin who had never had to compile 
nothing, like me!

As you pointed out, until ezjail(5) doesn't support that procedure I won't 
likely use it in production, since the advantages that Dirk's framework 
brings in managing jails are more valuable to me than the "annoyance" of 
compiling from sources! :)


Andrew