2026-03-19 –, Room B
This tutorial delves into the practical application of FreeBSD Jails, specifically focusing on enhancing their usability and orchestration using powerful tools: iocage and Ansible. The examples presented herein are derived from and complement the official documentation of the proposed collection, offering a hands-on approach to managing complex jail environments. This guide is tailored for advanced FreeBSD users who possess a working knowledge of: FreeBSD operating system fundamentals, the iocage utility for jail management, and Ansible for configuration management and automation. The goal is to move beyond basic jail creation and demonstrate how to effectively orchestrate a production-ready jail infrastructure. As a preparation for this tutorial, the users are encouraged to read the documentation and test the proposed collection. The source code is available at GitHub.
My professional background is diverse, stemming from my time as a research assistant and Ph.D. student at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava. My academic work, culminating in a 1991 thesis, involved solid-state physics, measurement, automation, data processing, numerical mathematics, and programming. I also served as an instructor for the "Operating System Elements" course, with engagement in VLSI technology design and testing, software engineering, and operating systems administration.
I have been a dedicated administrator of FreeBSD since version 4.3, supporting small and medium-sized businesses. My commitment to open-source extended to developing software for Novell SUSE Linux, including device drivers for networking, wireless LAN, and Bluetooth. I later managed the "SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service" product for the same company.
Currently, I operate as a freelancer specializing in FreeBSD and Ansible. My expertise is underscored by a decade-long commitment to maintaining Ansible roles for FreeBSD, all publicly accessible on GitHub. A key recent contribution is the development of the Ansible collection vbotka.freebsd, which has garnered over 5,000 downloads. This collection includes specialized plugins for iocage—a module, a filter, and an inventory plugin—with comprehensive documentation on essential jails usability.
Furthermore, I have significantly contributed upstream to the community.general Ansible collection, including 25 commits and 12k additions. This work encompasses numerous plugins, documentation updates, and bug fixes, notably the integration of the iocage inventory plugin community.general.iocage into the collection. I also contributed the "Setting the Python interpreter" section to the Ansible Community Documentation chapter, Managing BSD hosts with Ansible.