Decided to actually start a blog or at least a log of what I’ve been working on.
I’ve recently gotten into illumos, the successor to OpenSolaris, and I quite like it due to zones which are akin to BSD jails or Linux cgroups/namspaces. Of course there is plenty of other things I like that I’ll get to eventually. 
Currently setting up a cheap VPS with SmartOS in order to make use of some LX zones to host some services. The interesting part of SmartOS is that the global zone, so the host environment, isn’t exactly persistent. However there is an option during install to make your ZFS pool the persistent boot environment.
There is a /zones/usbkey dataset that stores the persistent data that you would normally have on an actual USB drive. There really isn’t much that needs to go in there though other than your system config file, ssh configs, and shadow. Something to note is that SSH authorized keys don’t persist by default. You’ll need to create /usbkey/config.inc/authorized_keys along with adding root_authorized_keys_file=authorized_keys to your/usbkey/config file.
Currently working on some ipf rules in order for all external traffic to go to a router zone. This is pretty much what I’m going for in a very generalized view.
I realized the version of SmartOS I had installed on my mini PC at home was older than my VPS. Unfortunately it was unable to install as a persistent global zone on the zones zfs pool so still reliant on a USB drive. Came across this script to upgrade the USB which is authored by the founder of Syncthing. Neat.