Synchronising jails

[Johan Hendriks]

> 
> Hey Everyone,
> 
> I'm looking for a way to synchronise two jails. More specifically, I
> would like to keep/maintain an exact copy of a given jail. As an
> example: Suppose I build a jail A on some system (in my particular case
> build with ezjail) , and I copy the jail
> into jail B on some other system (using tar, as is mentioned
> here: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=17813). Now stuff
> happens in Jail A, e.g. files change, new stuff is installed etc. I
> would like to propagate these changes to jail B, but since the transfer
> is over WAN I would like not to have to copy the entire jail again, just
> the stuff that has changed since the last backup. It is safe to assume
> nothing in Jail B changes: I basically want to maintain the exact copy
> so if something would happen to the system running Jail A I can
> immediately switch to jail B without much hassle. 
> 
> Normally I would say this a perfect use case for rsync. But as the
> aforementioned thread mentions ``scp or similar wont work to copy a
> jail'', and I consider rsync similar to scp, I am under the impression
> that rsync would not be usable in this situation. Can anyone shed some
> light on this, or suggest an alternative to synchronise the jails?  
> 
> 
> Regards, 
> 
> -- 
> 
> - Frank
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"

Maybe you can store your jails on a per jail zfs filesystem.
Then use zfs send/receive to send the incremental changes to the remote machine.

Regards,
Johan Hendriks