From owner-freebsd-current Thu Oct 10 01:07:20 1996 Return-Path: owner-current Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id BAA27861 for current-outgoing; Thu, 10 Oct 1996 01:07:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: from labinfo.iet.unipi.it (labinfo.iet.unipi.it [131.114.9.5]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id BAA27818 for ; Thu, 10 Oct 1996 01:06:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (luigi@localhost) by labinfo.iet.unipi.it (8.6.5/8.6.5) id IAA05492; Thu, 10 Oct 1996 08:36:03 +0100 From: Luigi Rizzo Message-Id: <199610100736.IAA05492@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> Subject: Re: 961006-SNAP comments To: sthaug@nethelp.no Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 08:36:03 +0100 (MET) Cc: julian@whistle.com, henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu, danj@netcom.com, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: <7186.844899046@verdi.nethelp.no> from "sthaug@nethelp.no" at Oct 10, 96 00:10:27 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Sender: owner-current@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > > theoretically to help run / as a readonly partition > > > on NFS systems or such and > > > have the 'variable' files on their own partition. > > > > just theoretically, since a lot of machine dependant stuff is in /etc. > > I'd actually like to do a readonly /, and it looks to me like it > should be possible: > > 1. Symlink those few variable files that are left, e.g. /etc/ntp.drift > and /etc/ssh_random_seed into /var/run. have done this for a long time, a shared readonly root for diskless machines. /var is in a MFS partition. It works well, but it's a pain at every release to move files and create symlinks and modify /etc/rc to mount and init /var before trying to access files. And, as someone noticed, vipw does not like much this kind of settings. [I know I should be less lazy and write some script which does the work for me. :( ] > 2. Use DEVFS for the devices. Don't know about devfs, the way I do it now is to build a tar archive with all the stuff that goes into the writable /var partition, and extract it at boot time. This includes /var/dev which is pointed to from /dev. 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 http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ ====================================================================