Hi,

I was wondering if someone already tried to run slackware with a read
only / and have only /var mounted rw.

I'm asking this because I already know about some things which will
break badly if /etc is ro (/etc/mtab for instance) and thus I'd like to
know if its feasible to do it or not.

(Pointers to which things write into dirs other than /var would be helpful)

I'm doing this since I want to have 2 Streaming Clients for TV and these
boxes do not have harddisks -> I use NFS Roots. And now I'd for one like
to share one nfsroot for both clients and also would like to be able to
just turn these things off without a proper shutdown and not have to
worry about anything.

kind regards Philip

On Tue, 23 Nov 2004 13:52:44 +0100, Philip Lawatsch wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I was wondering if someone already tried to run slackware with a read
> only / and have only /var mounted rw.
>
> I'm asking this because I already know about some things which will
> break badly if /etc is ro (/etc/mtab for instance) and thus I'd like to
> know if its feasible to do it or not.
>
> (Pointers to which things write into dirs other than /var would be helpful)
>
> I'm doing this since I want to have 2 Streaming Clients for TV and these
> boxes do not have harddisks -> I use NFS Roots. And now I'd for one like
> to share one nfsroot for both clients and also would like to be able to
> just turn these things off without a proper shutdown and not have to
> worry about anything.
>
> kind regards Philip


/etc/mtab

/dev/log= syslog pipe or something.

Put them im /var

syslog can be told to create it's pipe elsewhere.
As for mtab, you'll have to mount /var without writing in mtab.

Alternately,
Boot a rfs that then links necessary root dirs to those in nfs mount point.

> I was wondering if someone already tried to run slackware with a read
> only / and have only /var mounted rw.

sure, see how Slax is made.

> I'm asking this because I already know about some things which will
> break badly if /etc is ro (/etc/mtab for instance) and thus I'd like to
> know if its feasible to do it or not.

symlinking /etc/mtab to /proc/mounts works, although it loses some
information that umount may need.

> (Pointers to which things write into dirs other than /var would be
> helpful)

boot you system and use `find' to find out what files are modified in the
last 5 minutes.


--
damjan