Install Jailkit on Ubuntu/Debian

Jailkit

Jailkit is a set of utilities that can be used to setup a chroot based restricted environment where users have limited access to the file system and the commands they run. The jailkit utilities make it easy to setup a restricted shell or run services or programs inside such a restricted environment.

Project website
http://olivier.sessink.nl/jailkit/

In this post we shall be installing the jailkit utilities on debian/ubuntu

Install jailkit on Ubuntu/Debian

1. Since jailkit would be compiled on the system, first of all, its necessary to get the build utilities to compile.
So install the following packages

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake libtool flex bison debhelper binutils-gold

2. Download Jailkit from the following url, or visit the website to get the latest url if it has changed.

$ wget http://olivier.sessink.nl/jailkit/jailkit-2.16.tar.gz

3. Extract the archive

$ tar -vxzf jailkit-2.16.tar.gz

4. Compile jailkit and create deb file

Jailkit already comes with necessary code and configurations to compile itself into a deb file that can be installed neatly on Debian based systems. Just run the following command and it should be done.

$ cd jailkit-2.16/
$ sudo ./debian/rules binary

5. Install the deb file

The previous command would create a deb file called jailkit_2.16-1_amd64.deb.

$ cd ..
$ sudo dpkg -i jailkit_2.16-1_amd64.deb

Thats it. Now jailkit is installed. Jailkit makes many commands available which can be used to setup chroot based jailed environments. Here are the commands

$ jk_
jk_addjailuser   jk_chrootlaunch  jk_cp            jk_jailuser      jk_lsh           jk_uchroot
jk_check         jk_chrootsh      jk_init          jk_list          jk_socketd       jk_update

All the above commands have man pages which contain more information about how to use them. Or read more about them at the website