In love with FreeBSD Jails
"Discovering" Jails
When I replaced my Synology NAS by a custom-built NAS running TrueNAS (see that article), I only wanted to move away from Synology.
One thing I hadn't realised, is that TrueNAS/FreeBSD would come with Jails.
While Jails are not really new, I hadn't really spent any time using them, but because of TrueNAS' GUI, I could now test them.
And boy how much do I love them now!
I have replaced a bunch of small bare-metal servers that were previously running Debian, and moved them to Jails.
I even have moved some of the stuff I was running on my FreeBSD laptop, to a proper Jail on that NAS, e.g. the Unifi controller (whose installation I detailed in that article).
Simpler life
This allows me having a single server in my home rack, saving space and power, but also simplifying the maintenance of those servers, since they're all running as FreeBSD Jails.
all I have to do to update ports is:
iocage pkg <jail_name> upgradethe same is true to update FreeBSD (e.g. for the newly released Security Advisory about
pf):iocage update <jail_name>upgrading FreeBSD would look like:
iocage upgrade -r 14.0 <jail_name>
Which Jail Manager to use?
I'm using iocage to manage my Jails, as it's the one "pushed" by TrueNAS, but there are other tools such
as bastille or pot.
I found this Bastille page which compares
them all, and it looks like iocage is no longer supported, so I'll have to
spend some time figuring out which one is the best.