mjail 0.2.0

Command line tool to create and manage FreeBSD jails

mjail

mjail is a command line tool to create and manage jails on FreeBSD.

With mjail, you can create a jail in a single command and have a virtual machine ready to work with.

For example, you can use mjail to create multiple independant ssh boxes on your remote server, and then be able to access them from your laptop, in the same way you’d access any Unix host, using ssh and a private key.

mjail integrates with the pf firewall to allow quick management of port redirections to the jails.

mjail relies on jail.conf and so is compatible with the newest versions of FreeBSD.

Features

Each of these features can be achieved by issuing a single mjail command.

• create a jail with an ip address on a virtual interface of the host

• create a jail that is accessible from the internet via ssh and a private key

• start/stop a jail

• delete a jail

• start a shell inside a jail

• update the base system of a jail

• redirect any internet facing port of the host to a port of a jail

Installation

You need to have the pf firewall and the local_unbound local DNS server enabled. Two simple commands will ensure this is the case. Run, as root:

sysrc pf_enable=YES
sysrc local_unbound_enable=YES

(the mjail initialization described in the next section will start these services if they aren’t already running on your system, so don’t worry about that)

Then install py36-pip, which is the python module manager for python 3 (here for python 3.6, but you can also use py35-pip if you prefer, any pip for Python version 3.5 or superior will work). Run, as root:

pkg install py36-pip

Finally you can install mjail. Run, as root:

pip-3.6 install mjail

Initialization

Before creating your first jail, you must initialize your system. This is a simple command. Run as root:

mjail init

This will, among other things, create a local virtual network interface lo8 on your host for use by the jails. By default, the 10.240.0.0/12 IPv4 range, and a randomly generated IPv6 site local network, are used for the jails.

If you want to use a different IPv4 range, you can specify it using the --ip4-network option. If you want to use a different IPv6 range, you can specify it using the --ip6-network option.

The preceding command was equivalent to:

mjail init --ip4-network 10.240.0.0/12

Jails creation and management

Create a jail

mjail create cooljail

This automatically gives the jail an IPv4 address and an IPv6 address in the local jail network, and it automatically starts the jail. The name of this jail is “cooljail”. You will be able to use this name later on to stop the jail, start it or delete it for example. This is also the hostname of the jail.

If you want your jail to have an IPv4 address but no IPv6 address, use:

mjail create cooljail4 --ip4-only

If you want your jail to have an IPv6 address but not IPv4 address, use:

mjail create cooljail6 --ip6-only

You can check the list of jails that are currently running:

jls

JID  IP Address      Hostname                      Path
2    10.240.0.2      cooljail                     /var/mjail/instances/cooljail
3    10.240.0.3      cooljail4                    /var/mjail/instances/cooljail4
4                    cooljail6                    /var/mjail/instances/cooljail6

To check what IPv6 addresses have been assigned to your jails, use:

jls -v host.hostname ip6.addr

cooljail fd48:6132:e79f:4124::2
cooljail4 -
cooljail6 fd48:6132:e79f:4124::3

If you don’t want the jail to start immediately, use the --no-start option:

mjail create cooljail --no-start

Stop a jail

mjail stop cooljail

Delete a jail

mjail delete uncooljail

Start a jail

If you have stopped a jail, or if you have created one using the --no-start option, your jail isn’t running. Sad! To start it, run:

mjail start cooljail

Execute a command inside a jail

mjail exec <jail_name> <command> [<arguments>...]

For example:

mjail exec cooljail cat /var/log/nginx/access.log

Start a shell inside the jail

# mjail shell cooljail

root@cooljail:/ # echo "I'm inside the jail"
I'm inside the jail

Create a jail that’s accessible via ssh

For that you’ll need a public/private ssh key pair. If you don’t have one already, you can create one using the following command (run this on your laptop, not on the remote server, as private keys shouldn’t be stored on the server you want to access):

$ ssh-keygen -f my-cool-key

You’ll get two files. The private key is contained in my-cool-key and the public key is contained in my-cool-key.pub.

$ cat my-coolkey.pub

ssh-rsa AAAAB3N...G7xAQt4LpCaEh/D+UpoChnJOXKV9 user@host

Assuming your public key looks like this,

MY_PUBLIC_KEY='ssh-rsa AAAAB3N...G7xAQt4LpCaEh/D+UpoChnJOXKV9 user@host'

you can create a jail that’s accessible via ssh over a port of your choice issuing this single command:

# mjail create cooljail --ssh-box "$MY_PUBLIC_KEY" port 4444

Note that the jail is not facing the internet directly. mjail just instructs the pf firewall to redirect the ssh traffic over the port of your choice to the ssh daemon running inside the jail.

Don’t choose the same ssh port for your jail as the ssh port of the host. mjail wouldn’t allow it since it would make you lose access to the host!

Then you can access your jail just like it was a new dedicated server.

ssh -p 4444 [e-mail]

where xx.xx.xx.xx is the ip address of your host.

That’s assuming you’ve added your ssh private key to the ssh-agent on your laptop using ssh-add. If not, just use:

ssh -i /path/to/my-cool-key -p 4444 [e-mail]

Adding ssh access to a jail

If you created a jail using a simple mjail create myjail command, it has no ssh daemon running and you can’t access it using ssh. To enable ssh access to the jail from the internet, use:

mjail set-up-sshd <jail_name> <public_key> port <host_port>

where:

• <jail_name> is, well, the name of the jail

• <public_key> is your public key as a string (for example 'ssh-rsa AAAAB3N...G7xAQt4LpCaEh/D+UpoChnJOXKV9 user@host'). If you generated your key using ssh-keygen it’s the content of your key.pub file.

• <host_port>: the port of the host that you will connect to in order to connect to the ssh-daemon of the jail. Use a non common port, for exemple 4444. Never use the same ssh port as the ssh port of the host or you’ll lose ssh access to the host.

Redirect an internet facing port from the host to a jail

Jails created with mjail never face the internet directly. They have an ip on a local, virtual network interface, inside the host. So how can you, say, run an internet server, such as Apache or Nginx inside a jail and access it from the internet?

By redirecting traffic from a port of the host to a port of the jail.

This is done with a simple command. Say you’re running Nginx on port 80 inside your jail and you want Nginx to be accessible from the internet. You want to redirect the host’s incoming traffic on port 80 to the port 80 of the jail. This can be done using the command:

mjail rdr tcp 80 to cooljail 80

The general form of this command is

mjail rdr (tcp|udp) <internet_facing_host_port> to <jail_name> <jail_port>

Of course, the ports don’t need to be the same on the host and on the jail. If, for example, inside the jail you’re running a Tornado web application on port 8080 and want to make it public on port 80 of the host, you’d issue a:

mjail rdr tcp 80 to cooljail 8080

You can cancel the redirection by running:

mjail cancel-rdr tcp 80

Packages

Use the pkg command inside the jail to install packages. There is no difference with what you’d do if you weren’t inside a jail. Each jail manages its own packages. So, you can for example, spawn a shell inside your jail, or connect to your jail using ssh, and then install the packages you want.

This way, when you develop scripts that install packages, you don’t have to worry about your script running inside a jail or not.

Base system updates

Base system updates have to be done from outside the jail.

To update the base system of a jail with the latest security patches:

mjail freebsd-update <jail_name>

Sometimes, it’s required to upgrade to a new FreeBSD version because the one you’re running no longer receives security patches. You can do that with:

mjail freebsd-update <jail_name> -r <to_version>

For example, if your jail is running FreeBSD 11.1, you can upgrade to 11.2

mjail freebsd-update cooljail -r 11.2

Only minor upgrades are supported (ie version 11.1 to 11.2, but not 11.x to 12.x) and even these haven’t been thorougly tested at the moment. So, please regard it as an experimental feature.

GitHub repo

https://github.com/leforestier/mjail