Tag Archives: Linux

FreeBSD Jail booting & running Devuan GNU+Linux with OpenRC

Two years ago I wrote a blog post named VoidLinux in FreeBSD Jail; with init, where we installed and “booted” VoidLinux in a FreeBSD Jail. I think it’s time to revise that post.

This time we will be using Devuan GNU+Linux, boot things using OpenRC and put some native FreeBSD binaries inside the Linux Jail.

Here’s what I’m running at the moment

root@srv0:~ # uname -v
FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE releng/13.2-n254617-525ecfdad597 GENERIC

To bootstrap the Devuan system, we need debootstrap. Specifically, debootstrap that ships with Devuan Chimaera. We can start by installing debootstrap from ports/packages, and then we can modify the rest.

pkg install -y debootstrap

Now we need to fetch Devuan’s debootstrap, extract it, put some files into our debootstrap and set some symbolic links.

# Path might change over time, check https://pkginfo.devuan.org/ for the exact link
fetch http://deb.devuan.org/merged/pool/DEVUAN/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_1.0.123+devuan3_all.deb

# .deb files are messy, make a directory
mkdir debootstrap_devuan
mv debootstrap_1.0.123+devuan3_all.deb debootstrap_devuan/
cd debootstrap_devuan/
tar xf debootstrap_1.0.123+devuan3_all.deb
tar xf data.tar.gz

# We need chimaera (latest, symlink) and ceres (origin)
cp usr/share/debootstrap/scripts/ceres usr/share/debootstrap/scripts/chimaera /usr/local/share/debootstrap/scripts/

Now we can bootstrap our system. I will be using a ZFS filesystem, but this can be done without ZFS as well.

Keep in mind that my Jail’s path is going to be /usr/local/jails/devuan0, modify this path as needed ๐Ÿ™‚

zfs create zroot/jails/devuan0

debootstrap --no-check-gpg --arch=amd64 chimaera /usr/local/jails/devuan0/ http://pkgmaster.devuan.org/merged/

The installation should start now but at some point there, we’ll get the following error:

I: Configuring libpam-runtime...
I: Configuring login...
I: Configuring util-linux...
I: Configuring mount...
I: Configuring sysvinit-core...
W: Failure while configuring required packages.
W: See /usr/local/jails/devuan0/debootstrap/debootstrap.log for details (possibly the package package is at fault)

DON’T PANIC! This is fine ๐Ÿ™‚ We just need to chroot inside, fix this manually and install OpenRC


chroot /usr/local/jails/devuan0 /bin/bash
# Fix base packages
dpkg --force-depends -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
# Set Cache-Start
echo "APT::Cache-Start 251658240;" > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/00chroot
# Install OpenRC
apt update
apt install openrc

We have almost everything ready. We just need to create a password database file that the jail(8) command uses internally.

cd /usr/local/jails/devuan0/etc/
echo "root::0:0::0:0:Charlie &:/root:/bin/bash" > master.passwd
pwd_mkdb -d ./ -p master.passwd
# Restore the Linux passwd file
cp passwd- passwd

We can also move our statically linked FreeBSD binaries into the Linux Jail so we can use them when needed

cp -a /rescue /usr/local/jails/devuan0/native

Now we just need our Jail configuration file. We can put that at /etc/jail.conf.d/devuan0.conf

(This assumes that you’re network is configured similar to “VNET Jail HowTo Part 2: Networking”

# vim: set syntax=sh:
exec.clean;
allow.raw_sockets;
mount.devfs;

devuan0 {
  # ID == epair index :)
  $id             = "0";
  $bridge         = "bridge0";
  # Set a domain :)
  $domain         = "bsd.am";
  vnet;
  vnet.interface = "epair${id}b";

  mount.fstab     = "/etc/jail.conf.d/${name}.fstab";

  exec.prestart   = "ifconfig epair${id} create up";
  exec.prestart  += "ifconfig epair${id}a up descr vnet-${name}";
  exec.prestart  += "ifconfig ${bridge} addm epair${id}a up";

  exec.start      = "/sbin/openrc default";

  exec.stop       = "/sbin/openrc shutdown";

  exec.poststop   = "ifconfig ${bridge} deletem epair${id}a";
  exec.poststop  += "ifconfig epair${id}a destroy";

  host.hostname   = "${name}.${domain}";
  path            = "/usr/local/jails/devuan0";

  # Maybe mkdir this path :)
  exec.consolelog = "/var/log/jail/${name}.log";

  persist;
  allow.socket_af;
}

As you have guessed, we also need an fstab file, that should go into /etc/jail.conf.d/devuan0.fstab

devfs       /usr/local/jails/devuan0/dev      devfs     rw                   0 0
tmpfs       /usr/local/jails/devuan0/dev/shm  tmpfs     rw,size=1g,mode=1777 0 0
fdescfs     /usr/local/jails/devuan0/dev/fd   fdescfs   rw,linrdlnk          0 0
linprocfs   /usr/local/jails/devuan0/proc     linprocfs rw                   0 0
linsysfs    /usr/local/jails/devuan0/sys      linsysfs  rw                   0 0
tmpfs       /usr/local/jails/devuan0/tmp      tmpfs     rw,mode=1777         0 0

Finally, let’s load some kernel modules (in case they haven’t yet)

service linux enable
service linux start
kldload netlink

Let’s start our Jail!

jail -c -f /etc/jail.conf.d/devuan0.conf

Is it running?

 # jls -N
 JID             IP Address      Hostname                      Path
 devuan0                         devuan0.bsd.am                /usr/local/jails/devuan0

Yes it is!

Now we can jexec into it and run things!

root@srv0:~ # jexec -l devuan0 /bin/bash
root@devuan0:~# uname -a
Linux devuan0.bsd.am 4.4.0 FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE releng/13.2-n254617-525ecfdad597 GENERIC x86_64 GNU/Linux

The process tree looks neat as well!

root@devuan0:~# ps f
  PID TTY      STAT   TIME COMMAND
74682 pts/1    S      0:00 /bin/bash
78212 pts/1    R+     0:00  \_ ps f
48412 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/sbin/cron
41190 ?        Ss     0:00 /usr/sbin/rsyslogd

Let’s do some networking things! Let’s setup networking and install OpenSSH.
(This assumes that you’re network is configured similar to “VNET Jail HowTo Part 2: Networking”)

# Setup network interfaces
/native/ifconfig lo0 inet 127.0.0.1/8 up
/native/ifconfig epair0b inet 10.0.0.10/24 up
/native/route add default 10.0.0.1

# Install and start OpenSSH server
apt-get --no-install-recommends install openssh-server
rc-service ssh start

You should be able to ping things now

~# ping -n -c 1 bsd.am
ping: WARNING: setsockopt(ICMP_FILTER): Protocol not available
PING  (37.252.73.34) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 37.252.73.34: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=2.60 ms

---  ping statistics ---
1 packets transmitted, 1 received, 0% packet loss, time 0ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 2.603/2.603/2.603/0.000 ms

To make the networking configuration persistent, we can use the rc.local file that OpenRC executes at boot.

chmod +x /etc/rc.local
echo '/native/ifconfig lo0 inet 127.0.0.1/8 up' >> /etc/rc.local
echo '/native/ifconfig epair0b inet 10.0.0.10/24 up' >> /etc/rc.local
echo '/native/route add default 10.0.0.1' >> /etc/rc.local

Do you know what this means? It means that now you can have proper ZFS, DTrace and pf firewalling with Linux. Congrats, now you have clean waters.

That’s all folksโ€ฆ

P.S. I would like to thank my mentor, norayr, for showing me how to start/stop OpenRC manually, and the awesome folks at #devuan for their help.

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Antranig Vartanian

July 10, 2023

In case you didn’t know, OpenSMTPd is so outdated on Ubuntu systems, that you’ll need to install it from sources, otherwise expect some TLS issues ๐Ÿ™‚

You will need to use the following:

./configure \
 --with-user-smtpd=opensmtpd \
 --with-user-queue=opensmtpq \
 --with-group-queue=opensmtpq

mkdir -p /var/empty

ln -s /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt /usr/lib/ssl/cert.pem

Congrats, now you have a proper working SMTP server.

Cheers.

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Antranig Vartanian

July 1, 2023

A customer asked me to help them setup a tiny lab with many open-source tools. They are planning to move from corporate services to open-source alternatives such as NextCloud, Gitea, etc.

Unfortunately, they run only Linux, Ubuntu to be more specific, and as a UNIX gentlemen, I didn’t want to put everything into a single host, so I decided to use containers, in this case, LXC, a.k.a Linux Containers.

How hard could it be?

Oh god, layers of abstraction on within the system that have no idea about each other.

Like, who would assume that LXC would automatically download and install dnsmasq and assign IP addresses without my knowledge, or that it would push rules into the firewall?

The more I use Linux Container, the more I understand why FreeBSD Jails / illumos Zones didn’t win.

People don’t want automation or control, they want “please do this for me as I don’t wanna do it myself” tools.

I’d expect at least a message post-installation that says “We have installed and configured dnsmasq, reconfigured some systemd things, modified the following file (which is not mentioned in any man page, so you can use Google instead of man/apropos) and will use IP address ranges that you didn’t approve”

Is this why Docker won? Is it because people DIDNโ€™T want to learn how to do software packaging? I hope not. I wanna believe its because developers wanted to “think operationally”

Oh, and from a FreeBSD perspective, what’s even more weird is that

  1. there are no proper manual pages.
  2. the documentation is weird. It talks about a utility named lxc but I’m using 20 utilities named lxc-*, and I still cannot find the proper documentation for that
  3. it’s very much segmented. For example, on FreeBSD, we talk about which is better, jail.conf, BastilleBSD, pot, AppJail or Jailer. Here the same utility (lxc) that has multiple config files with no proper versioning, pretty complex manual pages and the not even examples or HowTos.

I’m looking at this and thinking โ€oh well, if we build a proper tool, I bet we can win some of the marketโ€ until you realize, of course, that when people hear FreeBSD, they will be thinking โ€itโ€™s not Linux? maybe itโ€™s not worth it, otherwise I wouldโ€™ve heard about itโ€

Iโ€™m just angry here. Please ignore my rants.

Cheers yโ€™all.

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Antranig Vartanian

May 16, 2023

A customer texted me saying they are having issues running our operating system on QEMU-KVM, so I opened a cloud provider’s portal, clicked on “Deploy a new bare metal”, and tried to SSH.

After waiting for a while, I see that I can ping the machine, but I can’t SSH into it…

I open the console, and this is what I see.

Screenshot 2023 05 16 at 6 37 28 PM

This. This is why I moved to FreeBSD.

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Linux is dead, long-live Docker monoculture

Full Discloser: While reading this blog post, please put yourself in my shoes. You’ve been looking around for a simple monitoring solution, you found some. None of the some are working because you use an Operating System that is used by Apple, WhatsApp, Netflix and many more, but developers think that everyone, everywhere, runs either macOS or Linux. And they all use Docker.

A while back Rubenerd wrote that he’s not sure that UNIX won and how Linux created a monoculture of assuming everything is supposed to run on Linux.

For me, this was not much of a problem, I can run Linux binaries on FreeBSD, I even watch Netflix using Linuxulator.

But now things are on another level, WAY another level.

I have a simple monitoring setup using cron, Grafana, InfluxDB and ping. It basically pings my servers and sends me a telegram message if they are down.

I set that up years ago, but now I have more public facing infrastructure that other people use as well, such as an Armenian Lobsters instance, Jabber.am, a WriteFreely instance and more.

As a self-respecting Ops, I wanted to make a simple dashboard for my users to see the uptime status of these services as well. First, they won’t bug me asking if something is not working; they will SEE, that, SSL/TLS certificate is expired, or the network is an issue, or that the server is down.

<rant>

So I started hunting on the internet for some software that do just that.

The first one that came to my mind was Gatus. I’ve used Gatus before for one of my clients, I like it a lot. It’s simple, it does what it’s supposed to do.

As a sane person, I fetched the code from GitHub using fetch, extracted the tarball and ran make. Nothing happens. Let’s see the Makefile, shall we?

Docker executed in Make

Oh boy, if only, only, I had Docker, all my problems would be solved. First of all, let’s talk about the fact that this Makefile is used as a… script. There’s no dependencies in the targets!

Okay, let’s read that Dockerfile. Executing the scripts inside it should help out, aye?

# Build the go application into a binary
FROM golang:alpine as builder
RUN apk --update add ca-certificates
WORKDIR /app
COPY . ./
RUN CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux go build -mod vendor -a -installsuffix cgo -o gatus .

# Run Tests inside docker image if you don't have a configured go environment
#RUN apk update && apk add --virtual build-dependencies build-base gcc
#RUN go test ./... -mod vendor

# Run the binary on an empty container
FROM scratch
COPY --from=builder /app/gatus .
COPY --from=builder /app/config.yaml ./config/config.yaml
COPY --from=builder /app/web/static ./web/static
COPY --from=builder /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
ENV PORT=8080
EXPOSE ${PORT}

There are multiple things wrong in me this.

First, please stop putting your binaries in /app, please, pretty-please? We have /usr/local/bin/ for that.

Second, I thought that running go build without GOOS=linux would solve all of my problems. I was wrong, very wrong.

root@mon:~/gatus/gatus-2.8.1 # env CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -mod vendor -a -installsuffix cgo -o gatus .
package github.com/TwinProduction/gatus
        imports github.com/TwinProduction/gatus/config
        imports github.com/TwinProduction/gatus/storage
        imports github.com/TwinProduction/gatus/storage/store
        imports github.com/TwinProduction/gatus/storage/store/sqlite
        imports modernc.org/sqlite
        imports modernc.org/libc
        imports modernc.org/libc/errno: build constraints exclude all Go files in /root/gatus/gatus-2.8.1/vendor/modernc.org/libc/errno

Okay, check this out, the package is called modernc.org/sqlite and it says:

Package sqlite is a CGo-free port of SQLite.

SQLite is an in-process implementation of a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine.

Of course it is. Looks like I have to port all of this to FreeBSD. Which, don’t get me wrong, I’m okay with doing that, but I thought that we have POSIX for a reason. notsomuch.

Okay, I’m an open-source guy, I’ll spend some time this weekend to port this to FreeBSD. Let’s look for another solution!

Here’s another one, it’s called statping, also written in Go, the readme is so promising.

No Requirements

Statping is built in Go Language so all you need is the precompile binary based on your operating system. You won’t need to install anything extra once you have the Statping binary installed. You can even run Statping on a Raspberry Pi.

Sounds good! Let’s try it out.

Again, I fetch the tarball, I extract and I bake make.

apt executed in Make

Of course it requires apt! Because not only we all run Linux, be we all run a specific distribution of Linux with a specific package manager.

While tweeting with anger, Daniel pointed out that I should tell them kindly and it’ll work out. I’m sure it will. Let’s hope I can make it work first. I don’t like just opening issues. I’d rather send a patch directly.

</rant>

Overall, now I understand why most *BSD folks use, what’s the word here? ah, yes, old-school software on their systems, like Nagios and the rest.

The developers of the New World Order will assume, always, you are running Linux, as Ubuntu, and you always have Docker.

Hopefully this weekend I will be able to port these software to FreeBSD, otherwise I will just use the Linux layer.

Like Rubenerd said, I am thankful that the mainstream-ness of Linux helped other Unix systems as well, but monocultures are destroying what people have spent years to improve.

Hopefully, next week, I will write a blog post on how to fix these issues and how I got all of those up and running.

That’s all folksโ€ฆ

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