[2019] Why I prefer thick jails over thin jails - Dan Langille

Why I prefer thick jails over thin jails Jails have a long history on FreeBSD. ezjail came along and used a shared basejail for all the jails. Upgrade that jail, and you’ve upgraded all the jails. It was wonderful, convenient, and fast. After a few upgrades between major versions, the author discovered he hadn’t been runing mergemaster on all those jails for all those years. Useful new features were unavailable, such as include on newsyslog.conf(5). Much time was spent doing mergemaster on many jails. Furthermore, if you upgraded the basejail, you really need to upgrade all the jails or you’d get stuff failing to run properly. There is more than one jail manager on FreeBSD. The author has also used iocage and likes each of for different reasons. When he decided to convert a server from ezjail to iocage, the existing script did not work, so he wrote a new one. He has since used it to convert two servers and has plans for two more. Now, the upgrades between major versions are relat