[nycbug-talk] jails and shared filesystems

[Charles Sprickman]

Hey all,

I'm hoping some of our resident jail experts can help out with this 
issue...

I've been playing around with 5.4 and jails for some time now, and for the 
most part everything is really nice; the addition of jail configs to 
rc.conf is excellent.

Here's my problem/question:

I will only be running maybe 4 or 5 jails on this box.  Two or more of 
these jails may need to share some files.  To add to the confusion, these 
two or three jails are somewhat unpredictable in their growth.  I've got 
about 270GB to work with.  While testing things, I just took that whole 
partition and called it "/jails" and then made "/jails/jail1", 
"/jails/jail2", etc.  Technically, that works.  But backing up and 
restoring one giant partition kind of makes me think twice about this.

What other options might I have?  I was thinking of grabbing 10-20GB and 
making that "/jails" and letting that be where my base system for each 
jail is installed.  This would also be "flat" and would hold any 
additional software.  I was then going to take the remaining space, and 
have each jail "mount" that, but apparently that's not really possible. 
At this point is where the jail/host thing gets confusing.  You can mount 
one filesystem once using the "/etc/fstab.jailx" method, but then you 
cannot share that space with other jails.

This brings me back to hacks like mount_null or NFS that I want to avoid.

Any ideas?  I'm thinking just making one giant partition is what I'll end 
up doing, but I wanted to run this by folks first.

Thanks,

Charles

ps - next up, quotas!  that looks fun...

___
Charles Sprickman
NetEng/SysAdmin
Bway.net - New York's Best Internet - www.bway.net
spork at bway.net - 212.655.9344