Questions regarding jails in FreeNAS 9.x

[amires]

Hi all,

I am currently running FreeNAS 9.1.1 which I upgraded from 8.3 using GUI upgrade. When I create a jail of type standard and uncheck vanilla I notice that a couple packages get installed, packages like debootstrap, apr, python, wget and ... Today I installed a fresh copy of FreeNAS 9.1.1 on VMware Workstation and I noticed when I create the same type of jail only pkg get installed. Does this mean that my FreeNAS installation is corrupt? Do I have to expect those packages to be installed when I uncheck vanilla?

 

[dlavigne]

It looks like that is a "feature" that is going to be fixed with templates in 9.1.2. According to the dev: Installing a vanilla jail shouldn't install anything. However, if a non-vanilla jail was created first, the newly created "vanilla" jail will be a zfs clone of the first template jail created. So lets say a plugin jail gets created first, a template for that type of jail is created (as a zfs dataset), pkgng bootstraps and installs a bunch of packages, then the template is cloned to create the pluginjail. Now, when you go to create a new jail, and uncheck vanilla, it will just clone the pluginjail template.

 

[amires]

It looks like that is a "feature" that is going to be fixed with templates in 9.1.2. According to the dev: Installing a vanilla jail shouldn't install anything. However, if a non-vanilla jail was created first, the newly created "vanilla" jail will be a zfs clone of the first template jail created. So lets say a plugin jail gets created first, a template for that type of jail is created (as a zfs dataset), pkgng bootstraps and installs a bunch of packages, then the template is cloned to create the pluginjail. Now, when you go to create a new jail, and uncheck vanilla, it will just clone the pluginjail template.

It all make sense now. Thank you for the explanations.