This is a seriously beefed up chroot kind of thing. The process
is jailed along the same lines as a chroot does it, but with
additional tough restrictions imposed on what the superuser can do.
For all I know, it is safe to hand over the root bit inside a
prison to the customer living in that prison, this is what
it was developed for in fact: "real virtual servers".
Each prison has an ip number associated with it, which all IP
communications will be coerced to use and each prison has its own
hostname.
Needless to say, you need more RAM this way, but the advantage is
that each customer can run their own particular version of apache
and not stomp on the toes of their neighbors.
It generally does what one would expect, but setting up a jail
still takes a little knowledge.
A few notes:
I have no scripts for setting up a jail, don't ask me for them.
The IP number should be an alias on one of the interfaces.
mount a /proc in each jail, it will make ps more useable.
/proc/<pid>/status tells the hostname of the prison for
jailed processes.
Quotas are only sensible if you have a mountpoint per prison.
There are no privisions for stopping resource-hogging.
Some "#ifdef INET" and similar may be missing (send patches!)
If somebody wants to take it from here and develop it into
more of a "virtual machine" they should be most welcome!
Tools, comments, patches & documentation most welcome.
Have fun...
Sponsored by: http://www.rndassociates.com/
Run for almost a year by: http://www.servetheweb.com/
This will make a number of things easier in the future, as well as (finally!)
avoiding the Id-smashing problem which has plagued developers for so long.
Boy, I'm glad we're not using sup anymore. This update would have been
insane otherwise.
the full argument vector.
I've bumped into a few things that expected this switch to be present,
the most recent was the snmp package in ports. I'm not 100% sure of the
origins of this, but Linux has it, so does the "BSD-compatable" version
of ps on our SVR4 systems (so I assume SunOS has it too).
. mention the need for procfs
. make it clear that default sorting is first by ctty, then by PID
Submitted by: schweikh@ito.uni-stuttgart.de (Jens Schweikhardt)
list the processes belonging to a particular user without having to use
`-u' and grepping for the username. Basically you can now get a short
`ps -x' like list (with more space for the command) for other users.