Future of jail(8) [WAS: preferred jail management tool]

[Mark Felder]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2015, at 16:05, Allan Jude wrote:
> On 2015-01-27 12:23, Mark Felder wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On Tue, Jan 27, 2015, at 11:17, Dirk Engling wrote:
> >> On 27.01.15 14:41, Ernie Luzar wrote:
> >>
> >>> I hope the ezjail author takes this thread as incentive to keep his
> >>> utility up to date and not let it die due to changing software in Freebsd
> >>> base code. All I am doing is pointing out the facts here.
> >>
> >> I am reading the thread. And I have been following the discussion for a
> >> long time.
> >>
> >> I have been served the jail.conf file format and offered my help
> >> improving the jail(8) tool to allow for manipulation of the jail.conf,
> >> because ezjail as a shell tool can not parse the format and keeping a
> >> shadow config with potentially conflicting information is not a stable
> >> way to maintain ones config
> >>
> >> A short summary is here:
> >>
> >> https://elektropost.org/ezjail/msg00149.html
> >>
> >> I also heard rumors that the jail.conf format is an intermediate format
> >> only, and/or there's gonna be a library to parse and manipulate all kind
> >> of structured config in FreeBSD.
> >>
> >> So I'd be very interested in keeping up with the base system's
> >> development, but regarding jail configs it looks like I'm stuck with the
> >> "use your vi to configure your jails" approach for 3 years now.
> >>
> >> Is there anyone feeling responsible for the jail(8) tool at the moment
> >> willing to accept patches and discuss development?
> >>
> > 
> > This makes sense to be broken out into its own thread. And I agree --
> > patches to jail(8) or a tool like sysrc(8) for editing jail.conf would
> > be a great way to allow third party tools to manage jail.conf cleanly
> > and effectively.
> > _______________________________________________
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> > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-jail
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> > 
> 
> I am working on such a tool, and hope to make it available via the ports
> tree after a few more tweaks.
> 
> https://github.com/allanjude/uclcmd
> 
> I have presented a little about the UCL config format at MeetBSD:
> http://www.slideshare.net/iXsystems/ucl-all-of-the-things-meetbsd-california-2014-lightning-talk
> 
> And I am planning to present about my tool, and the ucl config format in
> general, at AsiaBSDCon and probably BSDCan (I submitted 2 topics).
> 
> I have a prototype of newsyslog converted to a UCL based config file as
> well.
> 
> The jail.conf file may need a little tweaking (UCL uses the dot
> delimiter differently, so the name or structure of some of the variables
> may need to change slightly)
> 
> As with my change to newsyslog, the new config format will use a
> 'version sentinel' at the top of the file, if that is not present, the
> config file will be parsed with the legacy code.
> 

Fantastic. Look forward to seeing your hard work in the tree!