Date: Fri, 13 Jan 95 10:38:02 EST From: Martin Renters <martin@innovus.com> To: luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it (Luigi Rizzo) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: About readonly root partition Message-ID: <199501131534.HAA11820@freefall.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: <199501131351.OAA00429@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>; from "Luigi Rizzo" at Jan 13, 95 2:51 pm
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> 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. /etc, /tmp, and /var all need to be separate for each diskless client. I do agree that it would be a good idea to do something to allow selective mounting at system startup time. Perhaps init could tell that it is running diskless and run some sort of shared '/etc/diskless.rc' script which could mount the correct /etc, /tmp and /var filesystems based on some system administrator defined scheme. An example /etc/diskless.rc might contain: mount server:/exports/etc/$hostname /etc mount server:/exports/tmp/$hostname /tmp mount server:/exports/var/$hostname /var And then execute /etc/rc (which would now be the system specific one) Martin
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