FreeBSD 12 Jail Host - Part 2 - Jail Manager (2021)

Estimated reading time: Seal yourself in a dark room for a day or two.

In this part we will cover setting up iocage for creating and managing jails. Should be an easy one. (Famous last words!)

The Journey

All the parts in this series.

• Part 1—Basic System Setup
• Part 2—Jail Manager
• Part 3—Networking
• Part 4—Jails
• Part 5—Usage

The Jail Manager

There are many options for managing jails on FreeBSD. I chose iocage because it supports all of the features I want, integrated directly with vnet, and is used in FreeNAS which means there is already a fairly large installbase using it ensuring it should be relatively stable and tested.

To start, let's get the iocage package installed:

# pkg install py37-iocage
			

iocage wants fdescfs mounted, so let's enable that. Add the following to your /etc/fstab and then mount it.

fdescfs /dev/fd fdescfs rw  0   0
			

iocage needs to be activated and linked to a zfs pool, and then we need to download a base release for creating jails. Use whichever zpool you created for this purpose in Part 1.

# iocage activate [your_label]
[...]
# iocage fetch
[follow prompts to download the desired release]
			

The Conclusion

A nice easy one to give you a break before we set up the networking in Part 3.