Running Jails
In this entry I described how to access a Common Lisp REPL running inside a remote FreeBSD jail over ssh from within your local Emacs. (Fully buzzword-compliant it is! ;-)
For managing jails, I use Kirk Strauser's JailAdmin. Here's a snippet of jailadmin.conf:
jaildir=/usr/jails
server1
ip: 10.1.1.10
hostname: vs-1-10.netmemetic.com
The first line identifies the location of my jails. The second line, containing the label "server1", is the jail's name. The last two lines are the jail's parameters. Note that the hostname is what the jail knows itself as, whereas the label is what JailAdmin works with.
Obviously, to connect to the jail from outside, DNS must be setup properly. In the case where the jail runs on a reserved IP address, such as 10.1.1.10 in the above example, additional configuration in the form of network address translation and routing (on the FreeBSD host) is required.
To start the jail,
jailadmin start server1
JailAdmin's other commands are 'stop' and 'status'.
Including JailAdmin, I know of these toolkits to manage FreeBSD jails:
I haven't used the other two myself. I intend to try them out when I install FreeBSD 5; I might do that in a virtual machine first.