a remote control and convenience wrapper for ezjail
Project description
ezjail-remote is a ‘remote control’ and convenience wrapper for the ezjail-admin command of the most excellent ezjail tool (which in turn is itself a convenience wrapper for jails, FreeBSD’s leight-weight virtualization solution).
Its main features are:
more sophisticated support for flavours, i.e. interactive configuration and/or templating as opposed to ezjail’s hardcoded flavours
you can ssh into jails created by ezjail-remote immediately upon creation (no more manual mucking about with sshd config or uploading your public key!)
unlike ezjail-admin, ezjail-remote is not invoked on the jail host, but on your local machine.
Usage
ezjail-remote uses the fabric library to remotely run its tasks. Basically it provides a so-called fabfile that contains all of the commands of ezjail-admin (version 3.1 as of this writing).
This means that its usage differs slightly from that of ezjail-admin. In particular, you provide the hostname of the jail server via the -H switch and the parameters for the command (such as the name of the jail etc) separated with a colon, like so:
ezjail-remote -H host(s) <COMMAND>:param1,param2,param3
or:
ezjail-remote -H host(s) <COMMAND>:param1=foo,param3=bar
See the full documentation of what fabric has to offer here.
In particualar, you can…
run ezjail-remote --help to see a list of the available options
run ezjail-remote -l to see a list of the available commands
run ezjail-remote -d COMMAND to see a detailed description of a command
As a side effect of using fabric, you can run ezjail-admin commands against multiple jailhosts at the same time.
Commands
In its simplest form, ezjail remote offers the exact same commands as ezjail-admin, namely [archive|config|console|create|delete|install|list|restore|update]. In addition to that it provides enhanced versions of create and destroy (the latter a more thorough variant of the delete command.)
create
creates a new jail instance on the given host, creates an admin user with sudo privileges and enables ssh access via public key.
parameters
- name
name of the new jail, required
- IP
the IP address, required
- admin
name of the admin user for the jail, defaults to the current user. the user will be created and added to wheel (which in turn will be allowed to sudo without password).
- keyfile
public key to install for the admin user, defaults to ~/.ssh/identity.pub.
- flavour
the name of the local flavour, defaults to basic.
destroy
stops, removes and deletes the given jail instance (but not before asking you one last time, explicitely). however, once you confirm, the jail is irrevocably gone.
parameters
- name
name of the new jail, required
Installation
Simply use easy_install:
easy_install ezjail-remote
Development
To develop ezjail-remote itself, check out a copy of this repository and then:
virtualenv . --no-site-package ./bin/python setup.py develop
Change history
0.1 - 2011-07-29
Initial release. Provides ‘pass through’ of all commands, as well as enhanced versions for create and destroy.
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