OSS Control Panel to manage FreeBSD jails ... ?

[Tom Judge]

On 07/21/2010 06:49 PM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>
> About 6 years ago or so, we wrote an inhouse control panel to allow us
> to manage freebsd jails from a central gui ... although it works, its
> neither intuitive or pretty ... and is a nightmare to change ...
>

At $work use a heavily customized version of RackTables with support for
managing FreeBSD Jails across all of our sites (200+ hosts, 570+
jails).  The backend management is driven by cfengine with a custom
module that leverages ezjail to the actual jail management.

You can find the backend details here:

http://www.tomjudge.com/index.php/CFEngine/Managing_FreeBSD_Jails

Our full modifications to RackTables include role based package
management and automated package building using tinderbox nodes, which I
have yet to completely write up.

> The features it does have is:
>
> each client has 1 or more login ideas tot heir account
> a client can have multiple jails assigned to them
>   - front page has a summary of memory, storage and bandwidth usage
>   - each VPS has their own detail screen that includes the above, as well
>     as any virtual hosts that are running on it
>   - new virtual machines can be requesetd
>   - new virtual hosts can be added
>   - mysql/pgsql databases can be added / deleted
> all invoicing is performed automatically through the system
> there is a support center for clients to post problems
>
The system is not any where near this advanced, it does however work
quite nicely for us.   To distribute the configuration data across our 7
sites we use MySQL replication and each node uses a local replica of the
configuration database.

Most of the monitoring functions we use cacti and nagios to perform but
they are not integrated into the user interface in a nice/useful way.

For us the way forward is looking to be openQRM and adding jail support
to it.

> what it doesn't do is dns or email management ... dns is modified 'by
> request', and email is a totally seperate, unintegrated inferface ...
>
For DNS management we use Bind with the ldap backend as a master, then 2
slaves at each site.  To push out changes we have a collection of
scripts that send SOA notifications out on different IP addresses.  This
is needed as a number of zones are split horizon and all updates
originate from our internal network.

> I've tried DTC, and its a nice interface, but its more a 'seperate
> instance per VPS' vs centralized solution ... I don't want to have to
> log into multiple interfaces to deal with support issues, for instance
> .. but, at the same time, don't want to force a client to have two
> different interfaces to handle things ...
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions on software that could replace this? 
> I don't want ot run VMWare, or any of the other virtualization
> software packages, I would like to stick, as much as possible, to a
> nice, clean, jail environment ...
>
Not sure if any of the info I have provided is useful to you, but
someone may find it useful. 

Tom
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TJU13-ARIN