Solved Transferring a Jail

Xrsus

Xrsus

I have FreeBSD set up on multiple machines, and I am looking for advice on the best way to transfer a jail from one system to another.

Essentially, system A with the jails on it now, is running 7.2, and the 3 jails are also running a full 7.2. They are located in /usr/jail/cell01, /usr/jail/cell02, and /usr/jail/cell03 respectively.

I have system B running 7.2 as well.

I realize I'm going to have to change IP information in the main server for starting the jails, and of course configuration files within the jails themselves once they are running. What is the best way to transfer these full jail environments over to the new system? Is it as simple as tar-ing the whole jail folder structure for each jail, copying it over, and then starting it?

Thanks in advance for any help, and I don't mind doing further reading either if someone can post links to such required reading. :)
 
You could also use rsync, to copy the jail's filesystems over. This way, you will copy the bulk of the data while the jail is running, and can copy the changed data via rsync while the jail is down, thus minimizing downtime.

If you use the FreeBSD jail infrastructure (via rc.conf) then you need to copy the jail configuration to the new system, shutdown jail in the old system, remove IP address from the old system, assign the IP address to the new host and start the jail there.

This assumes kernels etc are the same.
 
Doing it by hand, log in on the remote system and do this as root:
# ssh [email]user@first.system[/email] tar -C /usr/jail -cf - cell01 | tar -C /usr/jail -xvf -

You can't just use scp or similar because that will wreck hard and softlinks.
 
I know this topic is old but I come across while looking for the same, so here is one other solution I tried and it works for me, refer: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/jails-ezjail.html and http://www.bsdnow.tv/tutorials/jails
Code: 
You can easily move jails between hosts with minimal configuration changes. Let's stop our example jail and archive it to a file.
# ezjail-admin stop bsdnow.tv
# ezjail-admin archive bsdnow.tv

The archived file should appear in /usr/jails/ezjail_archives. You can securely transfer the file to another server, make a new basejail and put the archive in place.
# ezjail-admin create -a /usr/jails/ezjail_archives/bsdnow_tv.tar.gz bsdnow.tv 192.168.1.13
# ezjail-admin start bsdnow.tv
 
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