RE: [Openvds-devel] jail

[Dave Cost]

Andres,

Sure I've heard of jail and I'm also using it on production servers (even if
I'm moving everything over to openvds).

Jail is a slightly more automated chroot.

The jail function will recreate an environment the same way you could copy
the shared libraries under linux and then chroot there. I recall there were
some slight differences at the kernel level, but that is what jail is all
about.

OpenVDS/FreeVSD are somewhat more elaborate. You have a daemon that
understands what's going on. You have virtuald that knows what processes to
start so you don't need to have them running all the time. You have
authentication and security and distributed control over several physical
servers if you whish.

 If we speak commercial (sphera, ensim) I can tell you that sphera is very
close to what OpenVDS should have been one year ago if idaya didn't stop
supporting it. Sphera even provides a name-based VDS which is something we
cannot have ...yet. Sphera lacks the support of more domain names per
virtual server but they're working on it.

On the other hand the jail function of xxxBSD has been the same for a lot of
time and there seems to be no development in progress. Some ISP have used it
commercially, but I have not heard of a real commercial/opensource product
like OpenVDS and Sphera and Ensim are. The FreeBSD is more do-it-yourself,
altough rock solid and ... its still BDS. It's not linux and even if
source-code compatibility exists, you'll find that packages still need some
porting to work there.

So, to answer your question. We're not reinventing the wheel.... we're
talking of engines here ;-)) ....

Dave.