IOCAGE General Knowledge

[1337Hacker]

I know I'm late to the show regarding IOCAGE, but can someone give me more technical details about what it is? Was it always part of FreeNAS? I tried searching for information but I only get results for creating jails in it (as opposed to Warden).

I update from 11.0 > 11.1-U4 and suddenly I have a bunch of datasets, not sure how they got there, what purpose they serve, or if they are necessary.

 

[kdragon75]

iocage is replacing warden. At this point is must be managed through the CLI on 11.1u4. It uses the datasets to store jail data, templates etc.. For more information about how iocage works you can refer to the iocage man page and other public documentation.

 

[DrKK]

I know I'm late to the show regarding IOCAGE, but can someone give me more technical details about what it is? Was it always part of FreeNAS? I tried searching for information but I only get results for creating jails in it (as opposed to Warden).

I update from 11.0 > 11.1-U4 and suddenly I have a bunch of datasets, not sure how they got there, what purpose they serve, or if they are necessary.

Don't worry too much brother---I've been using FreeNAS for like 5 years, and am one of the most prolific people in the forum and the irc channel. *I* don't even know what iocage is.

 

[Jailer]

I know I'm late to the show regarding IOCAGE, but can someone give me more technical details about what it is?

It's a FreeBSD jail manager.

Was it always part of FreeNAS?

No. It was added in 11.0 and is the replacement for Warden.

I update from 11.0 > 11.1-U4 and suddenly I have a bunch of datasets

Those are created when you activate iocage. It's the dataset structure used by iocage.

iocage is pretty simple to use via the CLI. You can read more about it by searching the forum or by reading the iocage documentation.

 

[1337Hacker]

Thank you all for the replies. I also found this documentation (looks similar to what Jailer linked) with all the details of usage, but lacking any information on how iocage works: https://media.readthedocs.org/pdf/iocage/latest/iocage.pdf

Two simple questions left:
1. If I destroy the iocage dataset, or parts of it, will it be recreated the next time I activate iocage (I'm going to wait for 11.2 to migrate jails from warden)?
2. Within the iocage dataset, there are "download" and "release" datasets with 11.1-RELEASE; are these critical/active OS files or clutter from using the web GUI to update?

 

[Jailer]

Leave them alone if you plan on using iocage at some point.

 

[pschatz100]

Leave them alone if you plan on using iocage at some point.

They don't take much space and they have no performance impact on your system.