Jail description

jdescr command

% cbsd jdescr

Description

Each jail can have an optional description/summary. With this it is possible to generate dynamic documentation on admin pages. Using cbsd jdescr by itself outputs a description of all local jails.

Command

% cbsd jdescr mode=update jname=jname

runs nvi in edit mode and opens the description of the jail specified by jname. If you prefer using a different editor such (such as vim or mcedit it can easily be done by passing your choice with the EDITOR variable. Descriptions for each jail are stored in a text file residing at $workdir/jails-system/$jname/descr, where jname is the name of the jail. When a jail is moved or copied with jcoldmigrate, jclone, jimport/export operations, the description will remain the same.

Example (running mcedit to modify the kde4 jail using russian UTF8 charset):

% setenv LANG ru_RU.UTF-8
% cbsd jdescr jname=kde4 editor=mcedit mode=update

It is advisable to maintain meaningful descriptions as your collection of jails grows. In addition it can be quite convenient to aggregate this information in order to create dashboards and build jail maps. One example of how this could look is the following simple script: jmap2html.sh.html which generates an overview in the form of a HTML page dashboard sample