From owner-freebsd-hackers  Wed Jan 21 17:32:44 1998
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Message-ID: <19980121173212.02502@micron.mini.net>
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 17:32:12 -0800
From: Jonathan Mini <j_mini@efn.org>
To: Tom Bartol <bartol@salk.edu>
Cc: Snob Art Genre <benedict@echonyc.com>,
        Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>,
        Andrzej Bialecki <abial@nask.pl>, Jonathan Mini <j_mini@efn.org>,
        freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: One-floppy FreBSD + rich networking
Reply-To: Jonathan Mini <j_mini@efn.org>
References: <Pine.GSO.3.96.980121170422.29748A-100000@echonyc.com> <Pine.BSF.3.96.980121164621.14765B-100000@dale.salk.edu>
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> Can FreeBSD run from read-only media?  Aren't there some files in /etc
> that need to be writable at run-time?

You are thinking of Solaris/SunOS. FreeBSD can (and in many cases should)
have a read-only /usr and / filesystems. Mount /tmp or /var as MFS or
another filesystem and you're all fine and wonderful. 

  I personally run kernel on one of my crash machines that
NFS mounts / read-only, and mounts an MFS for /var.  (/tmp is a symlink to
/var/tmp) Since my / filesystem also contains the /usr hierarchy (minus
home directories) I have everything available, and crashes and evil file
corruption possibilites from an unstable kernel don't phase me.
  My /etc/rc.local script (of course) builds a new /var filesystem on every
reboot, but it works great.

-- 
Jonathan Mini 					Ingenious Productions
Software Development				P.O. Box 5693,
						Eugene, Or. 97405

 "A child of five could understand this! Quick -- Fetch me a child of five."