this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2023
7 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37756 readers
523 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's "annoyingly hard" because you're not using modern tooling. If Docker is unavailable on your preferred OS, then that OS is stuck in the past. Simple as that.
Docker makes it easy to install a program, including all its dependencies, in a repeatable way. Since you're familiar with BSD, it's similar to jails except with better isolation, fewer security holes/issues, and the software you want to run is preinstalled. Docker containers are essentially mmutable which makes upgrades easy - just throw away the old container and replace it with the new version. (persistent files are stored separately, in "volumes")
You can of course manually install the same software by looking at the Dockerfile and manually performing the same steps, but there's no guarantee that it'd work well on an unsupported OS.
Calling Docker "modern" is a stretch, as it's not much more than glorified Solaris Zones, but please enlighten me: Which feature of a federated web application requires modern tooling?
OpenBSD does not have jails.
How so?
Actually, not using Docker prevents a number of security holes/issues.
If you grab an image with it. You could as well just grab a tar archive with it... with less side effects.
And security patches impossible.
And yet the OS you're using doesn't support it. Hmm.
Sorry, I didn't realise that these are FreeBSD-specific (I guess? I'm not too familiar with BSD)
Deployment. All web apps and APIs are moving towards containerization - Docker for smaller scale deployments, and Kubernetes for large-scale deployments.
I didn't think jails had CPU, memory, or process limits similar to what
cgroup2provides, but it looks like this functionality was added to FreeBSD at some point. Sorry for the incorrect information.Sure, Docker has had a few issues, but overall it's more secure to run your apps in Docker containers. If an app gets compromised, the attacker will generally be stuck inside the Docker container rather than getting access to your entire system. If you're worried about (very rare) container escape security holes, using unprivileged containers helps - You can run the app inside the container as an unprivileged user, and you can also run the entire Docker container as an unprivileged user on the host system.
Security patches are easier than if you used a tar archive to install the software. With a tar archive you threw into
/optor whatever, the app and its config/data are often stored together, so you need to be mindful of things like not overriding customized config files. Since Dockers containers are immutable and all the actual data is stored elsewhere, it's always safe to delete the container and replace it with a patched version.It would, but Docker doesn't support it. I'm not sure how this means that the OS was worse.
They are, including its descendants (that includes the FreeBSD 4.8 fork DragonFly BSD).
How is "run this black box of arbitrary software, requiring a kernel module and numerous services" a superior deployment than
tar xf application.tgz? Just because people do it, people could still do the wrong thing. Not every website is Facebook.No problem. I was genuinely curious.
Docker imposes additional attack vectors to the underlying system, a (for example) backdoored PHP application running inside an OpenBSD
chroot(OpenBSD runs its built-in web server insidechrootby default, so web applications can never reach anything outside the web folder anyway) does not, if I understand you correctly. I know that you consider the 1979 technologychrootto be not modern, but I wonder which security feature is missing.What if nobody maintains the container anymore, although the software itself is still maintained?