[nycbug-talk] newbie: ports into a jail

[Isaac Levy]

Hi Marco, All,

I just thought I'd throw out ONE STIFF WARNING regarding ports in jails.

On Jun 23, 2005, at 11:16 AM, Marco Scoffier wrote:

>
>   make DESTDIR=/jails/192.168.1.12/usr/local/ install
>
> Thought I would ask before making a mess of things especially the
> dependencies.


It is bad practice to install *anything*, portage or otherwise in a 
jail, from the host system.

It is good practice to install ports or otherwise from within the jail 
itself.

--
Due to library dependancies, various links in the system, etc, you can 
very quickly make horrific messes for yourself doing this.  It is 
important to install ports/software while logged into the jailed system 
itself, and really treat a jail like an individual server.

If this is a space issue, (keeping the ports tree via cvsup etc...), 
it's simple enough to just delete /usr/ports once your finished 
upgrading the packages.

--
This is where the ideas using nullfs come into play, mounting read-only 
/path/to/jaildir/usr/ports from a single copy elsewhere, but currently 
nullfs is broken (and therefore generally not trusted) in FreeBSD 5.x.

Best,
.ike