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Date:      Fri, 9 Mar 2001 19:14:55 +0100 (CET)
From:      Oliver Fromme <olli@secnetix.de>
To:        freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   nullfs et al
Message-ID:  <200103091814.TAA91443@lurza.secnetix.de>

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Hi,

What is the "proper" way to mount binaries etc. into a
bunch of jail homes?  Obviously, I don't want to copy
/bin, /usr/bin, /usr/lib etc. for every jailed user.
BTW, I'm using 4-stable.

I've grepped the lists and found the following possible
solutions:

(A)  Local NFS loopback mounts.  Seems to work reliably.
     Is this the best way?  Somehow it is my impression
     that the NFS causes some overhead and might cause
     some performance impact.  Any opinions?
     BTW, this particular machine doesn't use any NFS
     otherwise (neither client nor server).

(B)  NULLFS (mount_null).  The manpage contains explicit
     warnings, so using this is probably not a good idea.
     However, if the mounted directory is read-only and
     all NULLFS mounts are read-only, too, does it still
     cause crashes, or would this be more secure?
     Apparently NULLFS has been fixed in 5-current, but I
     don't want to run -current on this machine.

(C)  UNIONFS (mount_union), possibly with the -r option,
     which seems to be pretty much the same functionality
     as NULLFS.  The manpage contains the same warning,
     however, I've seen opinions in the list archives that
     UNIONFS is more stable than NULLFS, in particular
     when used read-only.  Anyone with more experiences
     on this?

(D)  Copy the partition data in the disklabel, so that
     multiple partitions occupy the same physical space
     on the disk (e.g. da0s1g and da0s1h point to the
     same filesystem), then mount each of them read-only.
     Would this be safe?  The only thing that I don't
     like about this approach is that it doesn't scale
     very well, because each disklabel only holds 8
     partition entries, so I would need a slice for
     every 8 jails.

I'd appreciate any comments.

Regards
   Oliver

PS:  Any replies back to the mailing list, please.
     No need to Cc me, as I do read the list.

-- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.

"All that we see or seem is just a dream within a dream" (E. A. Poe)

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