Synchronising jails

[Frank Staals]

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