Nico's blog

Accessing a new FreeBSD Jail via SSH

A very short one, mostly for me, as that's the second time it happens to me.

The Problem

After I created a Jail, when trying to ssh using its IP address, I was falling into the "generic" TrueNAS part, not the Jail itself.

I had created the correct user and uploaded my SSH key, but that wouldn't work.

The solution

In both cases, I simply forgot to... ENABLE SSH in the Jail's configuration! :-)

So a

sysrc sshd_enable="YES"

followed by

service sshd start

and next time I ssh'ed, I was in the Jail!

(of course I had to remove the old key in ~/.ssh/known_hosts).

Why did I still manage to SSH into the box?

By default, OpenSSH will listen on all the interfaces it knows, which includes the Jails' ones.
Since I hadn't enabled SSH on that Jail, I was falling back into the "parent" FreeBSD instance.

Tags: FreeBSD