Virtualisation... Thinking backwards...

[[XAP]Bob]

Hi all,

Very much a home user here - so performance will be more than sufficient with far lower hardware than I have available. My first FreeNAS box has been fine, with the exception of a cheap SATA controller, but hey - It was a 32 bit system running ZFS on 3GB RAM, it cost very little to assemble (£12) and as a proof of concept was excellent.

I am about to acquire a more suitable (still s/h) unit to use for FreeNAS going forward, and was thinking about bringing in other network services (DHCP, DNS, IPSec connection etc).

HOWEVER - I have been reading the "Don't virtualise FreeNAS" posts (which are all solid looking advice)

But - I'd still like to somewhat multipurpose this overpowered monster (i.e. a PC) to take on the roles currently occupied by my other servers.
So I was thinking about a Jail (or two) to house basic network services - is that a reasonable way to go?
With BSD's history in the area of security I was also thinking about using a basic jail based firewall (ipf/ipnat) to prevent my ISP doing network snoops (as they are known to do with their supplied router)? I could fairly easily pop another NIC in the machine (and, I presume, dedicate it to the jail?)

 

[cyberjock]

I don't think you can assign a given physical NIC to the jail. I could be wrong though.

 

[titan_rw]

You can assign a physical network card to a jail easily enough. See:

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/p...rk-interface-to-plugin-jail.11643/#post-53457

You have to reassign it every time the jail service starts though. And you have to configure it's ip settings each time. A script can do this for you, but you still have to run the script when needed.

This is for Freenas 8.x. I have no idea how things work in 9.