ezjail-remote

ezjail-remote is a remote control and convenience wrapper for the ezjail-admin command of the most excellent ezjail tool (which in turn is itself a convenience wrapper for jails, FreeBSD's leight-weight virtualization solution).

Its main features are:

- more sophisticated support for flavours, i.e. interactive configuration and/or templating as opposed to ezjail's hardcoded flavours
- you can ssh into jails created by ezjail-remote immediately upon creation (no more manual mucking about with sshd config or uploading your public key!)
- unlike ezjail-admin, ezjail-remote is not invoked on the jail host, but on your local machine.

Usage

ezjail-remote uses the fabric library to remotely run its tasks. Basically it provides a so-called fabfile that contains all of the commands of ezjail-admin (version 3.1 as of this writing).

This means that its usage differs slightly from that of ezjail-admin. In particular, you provide the hostname of the jail server via the -H switch and the parameters for the command (such as the name of the jail etc) separated with a colon, like so:

ezjail-remote -H host(s) < COMMAND >:param1,param2,param3

or:

ezjail-remote -H host(s) < COMMAND >:param1=foo,param3=bar

See the full documentation of what fabric has to offer here.

In particualar, you can...

- run ezjail-remote --help to see a list of the available options
- run ezjail-remote -l to see a list of the available commands
- run ezjail-remote -d COMMAND to see a detailed description of a command

As a side effect of using fabric, you can run ezjail-admin commands against multiple jailhosts at the same time.

Commands

In its simplest form, ezjail remote offers the exact same commands as ezjail-admin, namely [archive|config|console|create|delete|install|list|restore|update]. In addition to that it provides enhanced versions of create and destroy (the latter a more thorough variant of the delete command.)

create

creates a new jail instance on the given host, creates an admin user with sudo privileges and enables ssh access via public key.

parameters

name
 name of the new jail, required
IP
 the IP address, required
admin
 name of the admin user for the jail, defaults to the current user. the user will be created and added to wheel (which in turn will be allowed to sudo without password).
keyfile
 public key to install for the admin user, defaults to ~/.ssh/identity.pub.
flavour
 the name of the local flavour, defaults to basic.

destroy

stops, removes and deletes the given jail instance (but not before asking you one last time, explicitely). however, once you confirm, the jail is irrevocably gone.

parameters

name
 name of the new jail, required

Installation

Simply use easy_install:

easy_install ezjail-remote

Development

To develop ezjail-remote itself, check out a copy of this repository and then:

virtualenv . --no-site-package
./bin/python setup.py develop

What is new in this release:

• Add support for creating ZFS (and other image based) jails

What is new in version 0.2:

• split installation into bootstrap (which has proven itself useful outside of a ezjail setup) and install
• added support for ZFS
• can install ezjail from CVS
• added support for flavours outside the ezjail-remote package itself (using namespace packages for ezjailremote.flavours.*)
• added start, stop and jls commands.

Requirements:

• Python