BastilleBSD – @BastilleBSD – announced a new release yesterday, 14 July 2025. And the date is perfectly consistent with their name!
The project has reached an important milestone: version 1.0. I’ve never hidden the fact that BastilleBSD is my favorite jail management system. Even the BSDCafe runs on it. I’ve contributed code, implementing some things that are useful to me, and the development team (starting with Christer) is friendly and open. It’s a great project.
There have been a few minor issues in the past. For example, when moving from FreeBSD 13.x to 14.X, it was necessary to run a command on each jail:
bastille cmd JAILNAME sed -i '' '/pam_opie*/d' /etc/pam.d/*
But, in general, stability has been excellent.
Version 1.0 introduces many new features, but there are also some breaking changes. I’ll be testing it in the coming days, starting with more standard systems (at BSD Cafe, I also use fibs, which might complicate things).
Another fantastic announcement from the team is the creation of a pre-configured ISO. This includes FreeBSD 14.3, BastilleBSD, and Rocinante already configured, some hardening options, zsh as the default shell, and everything set up for pkgbase. I’ve just installed it and am running some tests, but I believe it can be considered an excellent way to get a system up and running immediately for working with jails.
In short, a huge thanks to the BastilleBSD team and… vive les BSD!
Leave a Reply