preferred jail management tool

[Valeri Galtsev]

On Tue, January 27, 2015 12:05 pm, Dirk Engling wrote:
> On 27.01.15 18:54, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
>
>
>> I for one would prefer this ("use vi to edit config files" which are
>> plain
>> human readable ASCII text). And I will be extremely displeased if config
>> files become XML or any other format designed for fancy GUI presentation
>> of plain information. And if I'm forced to use these GUI tools. This
>> basically what happened in Linux recently with systemd forced down the
>> throats of people. This caused new wave of refugees from Linux to other
>> systems FreeBSD being one of them. (I myself am a refugee from Linux:
>> some
>> 5 or 6 years ago I started migrating most important servers to FreeBSD,
>> workstations in our Department stay Linux though...)
>
> Did you take a look into the jail.conf format, recently? The mess you
> describe is exactly what we're stuck with, now. A structured file format
> you're supposed to edit with vi (and not mess up the structure) due to
> the lack of proper shell tools to manipulate it with.
>
> With the old approach "each jail config is contained in its own
> jail_JAILNAME_* variable name space", we could at least distribute
> config in different files and declare some of them being in another
> realm, like ezjail did.

> You could edit them by hand and more or less
> efficiently manipulate them in a tool.
>

The last is exactly what hardly anybody will object.

I must confess all my jails are still on FreeBSD 9.3, configuration is in
/etc/rc.conf (jails set up without using special tools or scripts, just by
following FreeBSD excellent handbook - "by the book" ;-) I just took a
quick look into man jail.conf. All still is plain ASCII text; different
syntax, but it doesn't call for any complaint in me. What I described
(systemd has many controversy sides, I mentioned only format of config
file) is different: imagine rc.conf or jail.conf all wrapped into XML tags
inside, which is pure junk obscuring everything, and serving mere purpose
of GUI tool nicely presenting that information. THAT is a mess! jail.conf,
though different in syntax from what I have in /etc/rc.conf, is still OK
for me. I just got scared by someone saying what sounded to me like: I
want GUI config tool, I don't want to edit with vi (or any plain text
editor) plain text config file. Next step will be config file is not human
readable. Which scared me to death, so I decided to speak up.

Valeri

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Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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