Guide to JVDS FreeBSD Servers Technology

Background

The basic setup we supply is comprised of a system image contained within a vnode disk. This is then mounted and a jail command run on top of this. The system images we supply come from a pre-built image to allow quick deployment of new servers. Information for each customers machine is kept in a database which is read at boot time to start up the jails in order.

Implementation

The way the service itself is implement is that we have a database that contains the vnode id, IP address and hostname. The system images themselves are stored as the IP address to allow easy identification. At boot time each image is assigned its vnode, fsck as appropriate and then mounted. After being mounted the jail command is run to actually start all the user defined startup scripts including SSH. It is then possible for your to connect to your server

Current Issues

We have FreeBSD jails to be a good system however they do have a few limitations including :

• Inability to send ICMP (ping + traceroute) packets
• Shared Memory Access is turned off making some application unable to run
• Only one IP address per jail

Within the 5.x Branch of FreeBSD these issues are being addressed. When in the official tree we will offer the functionality