Limitations of Jails

[gork]

I have a backup application that was formerly run on a standalone FreeBSD system. I am trying to figure out the best way to get it going on top of FreeNAS. It has some minor dependencies on packages that are not installed with the base install of FreeNAS, so it looked like running inside a jail would be the ticket.

The application needs both administrative delegation over a tree of zfs filesystems and the ability to mount NFS volumes (amd). It seems that I may be able to get ZFS management inside the jail, but NFS Client inside the jail still seems to be a no-go even with a VIMAGE jail. I have found various FreeBSD and FreeNAS bug reports and discussions about this but have been unable to get either in-jail ZFS management or NFS client working.

I am considering that the best option in this case may be simply to try to bring the few dependencies over to the FreeNAS base system and deal with the consequences of having a couple of packages manually installed. Is there a better way to approach this problem?

 

[nightshade00013]

You may want to explain the application in question by name to get some help with information. That way someone can give a yes or no answer to it as a specific or point you towards something that will do the same thing and not cause conflictions.

 

[gork]

It doesnt have a name; it's a fairly straightforward backup/replication script written by me and several others. It uses rsync to sync changes from a NFS path to a local zfs filesystem, then snapshots it and uses zfs send/recv to replicate the filesystem changes to removable media/remote system.

In order to work in a jail as I said it needs both administrative delegation of a zfs filesystems (ability to read/create/delete snapshots, and child filesystems, read free space, run zfs send/recv) tree and the ability to mount remote NFS paths (nfs-client), ideally using amd. Exposing parts of the host filesystem tree to the jail via nullfs is not sufficient.

For now I am running it on the host system by copying binaries and libraries that I need to a custom path and making them accessible via PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH. This kind of breaks the spirit of encapsulating the applications in jails, but at least it works and does not require any mucking about with the FreeNAS installation.