preferred jail management tool

[Peter Toth]

A good start could be to leverage something like sysrc(8) for jail
configuration (as someone already suggested).
Also, nothing enforces the explicit use of jail.conf or reliance on it (it
is just another way to set up jails).
The most important part is jail(8) and properties can be passed to jail(8)
very easily.

This is the very reason I stopped relying on any rc.d/jai or jail.conf for
iocage. It is much easier/simpler to add/modify features when dealing with
jail(8) directly.





On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 7:28 AM, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu>
wrote:

>
> 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
>
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> 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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