14.4. Fine Tuning and Administration

14.4. Fine Tuning and Administration
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There are several options which can be set for any jail, and various ways of combining a host FreeBSD system with jails, to produce higher level applications. This section presents:

Some of the options available for tuning the behavior and security restrictions implemented by a jail installation.
Some of the high-level applications for jail management, which are available through the FreeBSD Ports Collection, and can be used to implement overall jail-based solutions.

14.4.1. System Tools for Jail Tuning in FreeBSD

Fine tuning of a jail's configuration is mostly done by setting sysctl(8) variables. A special subtree of sysctl exists as a basis for organizing all the relevant options: the security.jail.* hierarchy of FreeBSD kernel options. Here is a list of the main jail-related sysctls, complete with their default value. Names should be self-explanatory, but for more information about them, please refer to the jail(8) and sysctl(8) manual pages.

security.jail.set_hostname_allowed: 1
security.jail.socket_unixiproute_only: 1
security.jail.sysvipc_allowed: 0
security.jail.enforce_statfs: 2
security.jail.allow_raw_sockets: 0
security.jail.chflags_allowed: 0
security.jail.jailed: 0

These variables can be used by the system administrator of the host system to add or remove some of the limitations imposed by default on the root user. Note that there are some limitations which cannot be removed. The root user is not allowed to mount or unmount file systems from within a jail(8). The root inside a jail may not load or unload devfs(8) rulesets, set firewall rules, or do many other administrative tasks which require modifications of in-kernel data, such as setting the securelevel of the kernel.

The base system of FreeBSD contains a basic set of tools for viewing information about the active jails, and attaching to a jail to run administrative commands. The jls(8) and jexec(8) commands are part of the base FreeBSD system, and can be used to perform the following simple tasks:

Print a list of active jails and their corresponding jail identifier (JID), IP address, hostname and path.
Attach to a running jail, from its host system, and run a command inside the jail or perform administrative tasks inside the jail itself. This is especially useful when the root user wants to cleanly shut down a jail. The jexec(8) utility can also be used to start a shell in a jail to do administration in it; for example:
```
# jexec 1 tcsh
```

14.4.2. High-Level Administrative Tools in the FreeBSD Ports Collection

Among the many third-party utilities for jail administration, one of the most complete and useful is sysutils/ezjail. It is a set of scripts that contribute to jail(8) management. Please refer to the handbook section on ezjail for more information.

14.4.3. Keeping Jails Patched and up to Date

Jails should be kept up to date from the host operating system as attempting to patch userland from within the jail may likely fail as the default behavior in FreeBSD is to disallow the use of chflags(1) in a jail which prevents the replacement of some files. It is possible to change this behavior but it is recommended to use freebsd-update(8) to maintain jails instead. Use -b to specify the path of the jail to be updated.

To update the jail to the latest patch release of the version of FreeBSD it is already running, then execute the following commands on the host:

# freebsd-update -b /here/is/the/jail fetch
# freebsd-update -b /here/is/the/jail install

To upgrade the jail to a new major or minor version, first upgrade the host system as described in Section 23.2.3, “Performing Major and Minor Version Upgrades”. Once the host has been upgraded and rebooted, the jail can then be upgraded. For example to upgrade from 12.0-RELEASE to 12.1-RELEASE, on the host run:

# freebsd-update -b /here/is/the/jail --currently-running 12.0-RELEASE -r 12.1-RELEASE upgrade
# freebsd-update -b /here/is/the/jail install
# service jail restart myjail
# freebsd-update -b /here/is/the/jail install

Then, if it was a major version upgrade, reinstall all installed packages and restart the jail again. This is required because the ABI version changes when upgrading between major versions of FreeBSD. From the host:

# pkg -j myjail upgrade -f
# service jail restart myjail

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