Jail management

[Alejandro Imass]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 8:13 PM, Aristedes Maniatis <ari at ish.com.au> wrote:

> I've been using FreeBSD jails (with ezjail) for many years and they work
> very well. However I'm now reaching a critical mass (30+ jails) where I
> want to be able to manage them in bulk more easily.
>
>
>
[...]


> * FreeBSD's packaging system doesn't understand the concept of installing
> a particular package version, so all my scripts will by default upgrade the
> application to the current version even if I don't want to. I can't easily
> install a new jail at an old version.
>
> * It is hard to reproduce the environment exactly, matching the
> application to the same version of Java that was available at the time of
> deployment. Again I'm fighting against the pkg system which always wants
> the latest version.
>
> * For failover I want each jail reproduced exactly on another host, or at
> least a snapshot which could be sent to another host within a few seconds.
> The jails are quite small (< 500Mb). Most of that is just the openjdk pkg.
>
>
Hi Aristides,

I read most of this thread and since you are already using EzJail why not
just create a "base" jail with and then use EzJail's archive feature and
then create/replace your existing jails with the archive as base? We did
something similar for Perl Catalyst applications, precisely to support
specific versions of Catalyst, albeit I did never automated alot, the
create from archive even worked on multiple servers so long the base system
and EzJail set-up was the same on all servers.

Best,
Alejandro Imass