Migrate from ezjail to BastilleBSD part 2: Migrate the Jails

September 17, 2023 6 minute read

How to migrate Jails from ezjail to BastilleBSD

In my previous blog post, I reviewed BastilleBSD. In this post, we go through the required steps to migrate the Jails from ezjail to BastilleBSD.

ezjail test Jail

To test the Jail migration, we’ll first create a test Jail with ezjail. This test Jail will migrate to a BastilleBSD Jail.

Create the test ezjail Jail

We use the ezjail-admin create staftestje001 'vtnet0|<ip>' command to create the test Jail.

Migrate from ezjail to BastilleBSD part 1: BastilleBSD exploration

September 10, 2023 11 minute read

Introduction to BastilleBSD

What are “containers”?

Chroot, Jails, containers, zones, LXC, Docker

I use FreeBSD on my home network to serve services like email, git, fileserver, etc. For some other services, I use k3s with GNU/Linux application containers.

The FreeBSD services run as Jails. For those who aren’t familiar with FreeBSD Jails. Jails started the whole concept of “containers”.

FreeBSD Jails inspired Sun Microsystems to create Solaris zones.

If you want to know more about the history of FreeBSD Jails, Solaris zones and containers on Un!x systems in general and the challenges to run containers securely I recommend the video;

“Papers We Love: Jails and Solaris Zones by Bryan Cantrill”

Sun took containers to the next level with Solaris zones , allowing a fine-grade CPU and memory allocation.

On GNU/Linux LXC was the most popular container framework. …Till Docker came along.

Application vs system containers

Build a 3-node Kubernetes cluster home lab in minutes: The movie.

July 21, 2023 1 minute read

I use the lightweight Kubernetes K3s on a 3-node Raspberry Pi 4 cluster.

And created a few ansible to provision the virtual machines with cloud image with cloud-init and deploy k3s on it.

I updated the roles below to be compatible with the latest Debian release: Debian 12 bookworm.

I created a movie to demonstrate how you can setup a kubernetes homelab in few minutes.

The latest version 1.1.0 is available at: https://github.com/stafwag/ansible-k3s-on-vms

Have fun!

Ansible roles: qemu_img 2.2.0 & cloud_localds 2.1.1 Released

June 25, 2023 less than 1 minute read

Time again to make some releases of 2 of the ansible roles I maintain.

This time none of the commits are created by me :-)

Thanks to https://github.com/fazlerabbi37 for your contributions!

Have fun!

qemu_img 2.2.0

stafwag.qemu_img 2.2.0 is available at: https://github.com/stafwag/ansible-role-qemu_img

Changelog

• remote_src directive
  • remote_src added this allows copying the source image from a remote host. Thanks to https://github.com/fazlerabbi37

Build a 3-node Kubernetes cluster home lab in 5 minutes (*)

April 4, 2023 1 minute read

I use the lightweight Kubernetes K3s on a 3-node Raspberry Pi 4 cluster. I wrote a few blog posts on how the Raspberry Pi’s are installed.

I run K3s on virtual machines.

Why virtual machines?

Virtual makes it easier to redeploy or to bring a system down and up if your want to test something.

Another reason is that I also run FreeBSD virtual machines on the Raspberry Pis.

I use Debian GNU/Linux as the Operating system with KVM/libvirt as the hypervisor.

I use Ansible to set up the cluster in an automated way. Got finality the time to clean up the code a bit and release it on Github: https://github.com/stafwag/ansible-k3s-on-vms