So, I am still building up my jail structure and the last few evenings I was testing the FreeBSD jail wrt. PHP, Apache22-mpm-itk and wordpress.
Things started to break when I redirected external traffic to the jail. It seemed that require_once(dirname(dirname(__FILE__))) . ‘/wp-load.php’; does not work from within the jail.
I decided to do a little test and testing reveals that in a stand alone configuration the dirnames behave exactly the same, in both the host and the jail. Printing the directive within WordPress (when loading the admin pages f.ex.) reveals a ‘.’ instead of the ‘/path’ . It is resolvable by adding a ‘.’ to the directive so that wp-admin/admin.php loads the ../wp-load.php file instead of ‘/path/to/wordpress/wp-load.php’. Though this sounds very sily todo.
Did someone else encounter this? I Do not want to change enforcement of the statfs to some other value since the defaults should be good enough (given the testsript).
Relevant details: the /usr/home where the public_html files live, are nullfs rw mounted from the host and are available in the jail. The jail does username/group lookups through Ldap, and can see the various users. Apache had been build with the ITK patches so that every host runs under his/her own user. I do not see obvious differences between the regular host and the jail, the only real difference is the internal/external addresses used in the vhost configuration, but that is kinda obvious to me.
Let me know 
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My blog runs in a jail on a 8.2 system (default statfs setting). The PHP files are served directly from UFS, not via nullfs (nullfs is used for the ezjail basejail handling and for distfiles/packages sharing between the jails on this machine, but the jail-specific data is on UFS). It’s a stock apache 2.2 (prefork-mpm) with php-suhosin. This works without problems or patches.
phpMyAdmin which I have on a -current machine uses dirname (I just did a quick grep for it), and I have no problems with it. The PHP files are on ZFS, nullfs is only used like on the 8.2 machine, I use enforce_statfs=1 for the jail, and apache is a 2.2 with prefork-mpm.
I suggest as a quick check to try to serve the PHP files directly from UFS/ZFS.
Hi Alexander,
Due to the setup i cannot use ufs directly, since the homedirs of users need to be accessible within more then one environment and we need to be compatible with the current setup (legacy heritage).
I am setting up a test environment to test what you are describing, lets see how that results. Thanks for your time to reply to the post!!
I don’t know what can be wrong with your setup. I am running PHP and Apache in jails with nullfs mount for many years without any problems.
I tried your case with following example:
It allways prints right resulting absolute path, no matter if it is in jail or in host, or if jail has nullfs mounted storage or not.
I tried it in CLI and with Apache mpm_prefork.
I tried PHP 5.3 and 5.2.
Can you try it from CLI and can you try it with mpm_prefork instead of ITK?
Also, can you try it with some simple test script instead of whole WordPress?
Dear Miroslav,
I have a basic test script which does exactly this from the same mounts and this seems to result on the desired behaviour. Sadly the installed wordpress doesnt seem to like it. I am testing in a seperated environment whether to see where this problem lies…
Oh and ofcourse thank you for replying and taking the time..
So, I setup a separated instance using the jail’s own infrastructure and there the wordpress installation works fine. The culprit seems to be the nullfs mount.
hmm… comment don’t like PHP code, so my example again:
echo dirname(dirname(__FILE__)) . ‘/wp-load.php’;