[ On Thursday, November 4, 2004 at 11:30:35 (-0800), Jeremy C. Reed wrote: ]
> Subject: FreeBSD-like jail? And virtual hosting management interface?
>
> So I am looking for free and open source alternatives to provide a
> web-based management interface.

I don't know about the web-based management part, but for *BSD users I'd
recommend Xen far over and above any other host virtualization solution.

	http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/
	http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/xen/

(that's unless you want to buy and run an IBM S390 with GNU/linux
running in the VM partitions! :-)

I've a colleague who tried using FreeBSD's "jail" to do something
similar and he's run into many problems getting quite a bit of necessary
functionality to really work properly in such a partially virtualized
environment.  Networking is only partly "there", for example as there's
still really only one network stack running under everything.  I can
imagine that what he's encountered is also only the tip of the iceberg
when it comes to handling more esoteric networking issues.

Part of that might be that the FreeBSD "jail" implementation is too
restrictive in some aspsects and too inflexible overall.

You might do OK with chroot+systrace, which is far more flexible than
"jail", but I think you'd then be mired into doing no small amount of
programming to bring it all together.

With Xen you get an entire, complete, true "virtual" host and everything
works exactly as anyone would expect it to.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
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