SoloBSD Mastering: ezjail and iocage

Today I decided to give a try again on jails in FreeBSD/HardenedBSD and found this great Tutorial about handling jails with ezjail.

I must confess that this is the first time I am playing around with jails, mostly because I have always used BSD systems inside Virtual Machines and didn´t know if I can run jails inside VMs. But now I know you can!

It is really simple to deploy a jail using ezjail, you can customize your jail using the configuration file and you are good to go. I have small issues on HardenedBSD because ezjail by default fetches source packages from ftp.freebsd.org. I wanted to create a HardenedBSD jail fetching packages but at the moment the project doesn´t have an FTP site configured for this. So I had to go with FreeBSD sources.

I had to install it without ports because HardenedBSD doesn´t use portsnap. But at the end I was able to log into the jail without any problems and was able to install packages inside of the jail. I know there are several more ways to install FreeBSD inside a jail, which I will explore in future posts.

UPDATE: 

I just tried with iocage, following this excellent Tutorial and I think it is easier to manage jails with it. You need less things to be configured in order to run the jail.

This time the test system was PC-BSD, and pulled FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE sources, this system is running with ZFS and iocage created all datasets needed automatically, how cool is that?

Comparing with Docker, I think I like jails more!