Month: March 2014

Converting a FreeBSD MySQL server to jail host with MySQL in jail

Posted on by Savagedlight

I have a FreeBSD 10.0 server which currently only runs Percona MySQL server 5.6 backed by ZFS. The SQL server doesn’t have a high enough load to justify dedicated hardware, but I also don’t want to run it as a virtual machine as I want to use local ZFS storage, and because of virtualization overhead. The server is dual-homed (DMZ and LAN).

The solution is to convert the server into a jail host, and run MySQL inside a jail. The overhead should be minimal to non-existing as I won’t be using VNET.
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FreeBSD jail server with ZFS clone and jail.conf

Posted on by Savagedlight

I’ll be using FreeBSD 10.0 AMD64 with root on ZFS, but you can follow these instructions as long as you have a ZFS pool on the system. It is assumed that the system is already installed and basic configuration is complete.

It should be noted that the benefit from using ZFS clones will more or less vanish if you do a major ‘world’ upgrade on the jail, for example upgrading from FreeBSD 9.2 to FreeBSD 10.0. This won’t be a problem for my setup as I’ll eventually get around to configuring sysutils/py-salt to automatically deploy my jails, and I’ll post about it when I do.
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FreeBSD package builder with Poudriere

Posted on by Savagedlight

I’m using FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE on my file server, which will double as my package builder. I’d prefer to run Poudriere inside a jail  so that all its binaries and configs are confined there, but this is not a supported configuration, and Poudriere requires so many permissions the security benefits would be minimal, and it still encounters trouble.

This shouldn’t be a problem though, as Poudriere won’t expose any services, and the packages will be published by a jail utilizing read-only nullfs mounts.

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FreeBSD jail host with multiple local networks

Posted on by Savagedlight

My jail host is running FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE and is directly connected to two local networks. One is my LAN, and the other is a DMZ for various internet-facing services. I don’t want my DMZ jails to be able to send network traffic directly to my LAN, and I need to set a default route for a jail depending on which network its IP-address resides for them to communicate outside of their local subnet.

To solve this, I’m going to use multiple routing tables, also known as FIB, which are manipulated with the setfib utility. I know I could have used the experimental virtual network stack (VNET), which is awesome, but I opt not to as it still has some problems with stability and memory leaks. EDIT: It seems that jails are able to use the ‘setfib’ command as well, so a firewall might be necessary to disallow communication between certain jails and destinations.

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