nslookup fails inside freebsd jail

Question

I posted on the freebsd forums. I've been trying all night and I've made some progress but still I can't connect to the internet from my freebsd jail.

Please just give me a hint here.

I get the following inside the jail if I do nslookup www.google.com :

;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached

So, I can't seem to install stuff inside the jail. OR, is there any way I can install perl and starman on my host system and copy it into the jail?? In the end I just need this stuff installed and then I want my jail off the internet.

I tried various things, from the plain (1) jail command, (2) ezjail and finally (3) qjail. Also did a clean checkout of the freebsd source and did a buildworld.

This is my network config ifconfig -a:

lo0: flags=8049<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 16384
        options=600003<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>
        inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
        inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
        inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
        nd6 options=21<PERFORMNUD,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
xn0: flags=8843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> metric 0 mtu 1500
        options=503<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,TSO4,LRO>
        ether 12:31:39:1c:f0:bf
        inet 192.168.1.101 netmask 0xffffffff broadcast 192.168.1.101
        inet 192.168.1.102 netmask 0xffffffff broadcast 192.168.1.102
        inet 10.110.238.77 netmask 0xfffffe00 broadcast 10.110.239.255
        inet 10.0.0.1 netmask 0xffffffff broadcast 10.0.0.1
        nd6 options=29<PERFORMNUD,IFDISABLED,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
        media: Ethernet manual
        status: active

This is the rest of my system:

cat /etc/rc.conf gives me :

# EC2 uses DHCP; the network interface appears as xn0.
ifconfig_xn0="DHCP"

### Standard FreeBSD configuration from here onwards.
sshd_enable="YES"
ezjail_enable="YES"

#for custom configs I hand made
ifconfig_xn0_alias0="inet 192.168.1.101/32"
ifconfig_xn0_alias1="inet 192.168.1.102/32"

pf_enable="YES"

cat /etc/pf.conf gives me:

ext_if="xn0" ##my network interface
MY_JAIL="10.0.0.1"
#redirect http traffic to daltons jail
rdr pass on $ext_if inet proto tcp to port http -> $MY_JAIL port http
#enable outgoing traffic from jail to the internet via NAT
nat on $ext_if from $MY_JAIL to any -> $ext_if

Any ideas, clues or hints?!

Answer 1

Sorry, got hung up on the connectivity issue and didn't realize you just want to install ports.

On the host system install PortUpgrade, it's much easier than fetching package deficiencies manually:

pkg_add -r portupgrade

Then use it to fetch the packages:

portupgrade -NRFPP $PKG_NAME
ie.
portupgrade -NRFPP lang/perl5.14

The package files will be dumped in the hosts /usr/ports/packages/All. Copy them to the jail(s). Install from jail:

pkg_add /path/to/file/downloaded/perl5.14.tgz

And Bob's your uncle.

I sometimes use unionfs so that the jails have the Package directory of the host; removes the copy step. UnionFS doesn't work on ZFS however (ZFS doesn't have Whiteout). And ZFS's snapshot/clone feature makes jails easier.