OVH (and Soyoustart, of course) network seem to be configured in a “strange” way and setting failover IPs isn’t always as straightforwar

FreeBSD - Assign OVH Failover IPs to FreeBSD Jails

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2024-09-04 13:30:08

OVH (and Soyoustart, of course) network seem to be configured in a “strange” way and setting failover IPs isn’t always as straightforward as you think it should be.

Sometimes you want (or need) to assign a public IP address to a FreeBSD jail without playing with NAT but there’s not much documentation on how to do it inside a jail.

First of all, go to your Control Panel (OVH/Soyoustart/etc.) and generate a MAC address for the failover public ip address you want to assign to your jail. Let’s assume it’s ca:fe:ca:fe:ca:fe

Now let’s go back to the FreeBSD host and take a note of its gateway (it should be 1.2.3.254, but double check), you’ll need it later.

Now it’s time to create the jail. I love BastilleBSD as it’s light, has no dependencies and is being actively developed. I won’t cover how to install and bootstrap Bastille in this article, for further information have a look at the official documentation.

We need VNET for this purpose, so our jail will have its own complete network stack. If you’ve read that VNET is unstable, you’ve found some old articles. Don’t worry, you can use it now, it’s stable.