9.1 Feature: Linux Jails
PC-BSD’s jail management GUI, Warden®, has been completely redesigned for 9.1. It now supports the management of three types of jails:
Traditional Jail: FreeBSD jail used to install and run network services such as a web server or a database which is accessible to other systems on a network or over the Internet.
Ports Jail: allows you to safely install software using FreeBSD packages or ports (without touching the packages that came with the OS) while providing access to that software from your PC-BSD system.
Linux Jail: allows you to install a Linux operating system within a jail.
Yup, that’s right, you can install Linux (at this time, Debian Squeeze) into a FreeBSD jail. And, since a jail uses the filesystem of the host, if the PC-BSD system is formatted with ZFS, a Linux jail can take advantage of ZFS features such as snapshots. Details can be found in the Warden® section of the upcoming 9.1 Users Guide.
If you’d like to try out this feature before BETA1 is available, use the instructions in New Features for the Impatient. If /usr/local/share/warden/linux-installs/debian-6-squeeze does not exist on your system, you can download it from here (download link at bottom of page). You will also need to install the debootstrap utility using pkg_add -r debootstrap.
Trackback from your site.
Comments (18)
It’s nothing new. There has been emulators/linux_dist-stage3 for several years, which also creates a full environment and you can chroot/jail into.
I was about to write ports/linux_dist-gentoo-stage3, sorry.
Correct. The ability to easily manage installation and snapshots within a GUI is new. Also, those emulation ports have licensing distribution restrictions whereas debootstrap does not.
dru, would you please elaborate on what the licensing distribution restrictions of ports/linux_dist-gentoo-stage3 are? Feel free to email me about this at my gentoo.org email. My handle is ryao.
On a related note, I have Gentoo Linux running in a jail on Gentoo FreeBSD. I was telling people about it and then someone told me about this blog post.
Thanks to Ryao’s help, a Gentoo script is also now available.
Cool, Thanks Ryao.
Interesting. What sort of limitations apply to these jails, ie could you get X up and running inside a linux jail?
Warden is designed primarily for installing servers into jails (i.e. the assumption of a server == no X). Each jail runs with an IP, so you can run network services. They most likely will run X apps but running a full X server is not the intent and an exercise left to the curious user.
Yes, it would be nice if someone explains about installation of x inside a jail and then forward to the host’s console.
I am aware that forwarding X to a console is possible in Linux with:
$xinit -e ssh -XCc blowfish user@ip_address_of_guest “/usr/bin/startlxde &” — :1 & disown
The above command opens up xserver in vt7.
Any pointer of the same in pcbsd or freebsd or freenas8?
do we have to jailbreak PCBSD before installing APPS?
am i missing something?
….
Shouldn’t have to. I know apt-get works on Debian. Haven’t tried the Gentoo one yet.
[...] home/office users and administrators. There’s better sound configuration, support for running Linux in jails, multiple boot environments [...]
Hi, is it possible to run pfsense or FreeNAS within these jails via Warden?
or install it in a similar way as you would Linux?
Not at this time as each is an operating system and there currently isn’t an installation script for either. I’ll mention it as a feature request. In the mean time, if you come up with a working installation script, let us know.
[...] again once the final version is released. The biggest new feature I’m looking forward to: Gentoo Jails - running a full Gentoo Linux operating system on top of the FreeBSD [...]
Just wondering what pkgs needs to be added to run x inside pcbsd jail? xorg and lightweight DE like lxde?
Tried with pkg_add -r xorg (ref to http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=16038), but reportedly got errors with some packages not found.
Thanks in advance for any pointers!
I know this is old but it would be nice to be able to install software from Linux inside PCBSD. What I mean is that the citrix client has not been updated in a long time on freshports. It would be nice to be able to get the software from else where and install it in a jail so it does not affect the PCBSD system but can still be used when it is needed.
Depending upon the app, it may “just work” due the linux compatibility layer. A PC-BSD system and a Linux jail should have this support enabled by default. You’ll have to enable it in a FreeBSD jail: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/linuxemu-lbc-install.html.