From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Jan 13 05:53:17 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) id FAA09002 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 13 Jan 1995 05:53:17 -0800 Received: from labinfo.iet.unipi.it (labinfo.iet.unipi.it [131.114.9.5]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) with ESMTP id FAA08995 for ; Fri, 13 Jan 1995 05:53:04 -0800 Received: from localhost (luigi@localhost) by labinfo.iet.unipi.it (8.6.5/8.6.5) id OAA00429 for hackers@freebsd.org; Fri, 13 Jan 1995 14:51:51 +0100 From: Luigi Rizzo Message-Id: <199501131351.OAA00429@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> Subject: About readonly root partition To: hackers@FreeBSD.org Date: Fri, 13 Jan 1995 14:51:51 +0100 (MET) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1373 Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk (Already posted this to -questions, but got no comments at all!) In the interest of better support for diskless and in general for multiple installations, it seems to me that it would be nice if /etc were *not* on the same filesystem as root, but rather in /var or some other location, so that each machine can have its own copy. Unfortunately, "init" looks for "rc" in "/etc", so mounting a new filesystem on /etc would as a minimum make the original "/etc/rc" unreadable, making it very difficult to modify it. At the same time, people are probably too much used to the existence of "/etc/rc" to move it somewhere else. So, How about letting "init" look for "/rc" instead/before looking for /etc/rc ? This would help in having the following: 1) a main "rc" is called, which does the initial checks; 2) mounts the proper filesystem onto /etc; 3) passes control to /etc/rc With the current setting, the above might still work except that, once the new /etc is mounted, the original /etc/rc is no more readable. Luigi ==================================================================== Luigi Rizzo Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione email: luigi@iet.unipi.it Universita' di Pisa tel: +39-50-568533 via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy) fax: +39-50-568522 ====================================================================