I've been searching for a way to create and copy jail images around for some time now and I've found a solution that works for me and thought I would share it with list and see if anyone can poke any holes in it.
Problem: I need to create a jail image that I can deploy on multiple servers, ala a generic apache jail or postgresql jail or whatever. I need to be able to simply explode this image in to a directory and have it work, I'd also like to be able to compress the image because it occasionally has to go over lower-speed WAN links. Here are the tools that I've investigated and the problems I've had with them: tar, cpio, pax: All 3 of these tools have problems with various combinations of meta-data, links, and things like device nodes. cpdup: makes perfect copies, no way to create an archive or image dump: only operates on filesystems. mksiofs: After 3 hours of trying various flags I was unable to create a perfect image, although I got close a couple of times. I finally hit on a solution that works for me. Create a filebacked md filesystem and create the initial jail on that, then dump it. From there you can use restore to explode it anywhere it's needed. so, as a quick example.... dd if=/dev/zero of=/data/jailfile bs=2m count=1000 mdconfig -a -t vnode -f jailfile -u 0 newfs /dev/md0 mount /dev/md0 /mnt cd /usr/src ; make installworld distribution DESTDIR=/mnt do the things you do to start the jail jexec in to it, install what you need, customizations, so on... stop the jail dump -0Laf jail.img /dev/md0 bzip2 jail.img Now you have a bzip2'd image file that you can restore to an empty directory any time you want a perfect copy of that jail. Another interesting thought is that you could restore to a file backed md device and impliment quotas...at the cost of preallocating the disk space. Anyways, for my problem set it seems to be a workable solution, whether it is useful for anyone else or not I don't know. Also, if you have a different solution or can see a flaw in this one I'd love to hear about it. -- Thanks, Josh Paetzel
pgptyUE759Cfv.pgp
Description: PGP signature