Date: Fri, 13 Jan 95 11:38:20 MST From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it (Luigi Rizzo) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: About readonly root partition Message-ID: <9501131838.AA10642@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <199501131351.OAA00429@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> from "Luigi Rizzo" at Jan 13, 95 02:51:51 pm
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> > (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. It seems to me that you could do the same thing with a symlink in /etc on a root partition, which is later mounted over with a sperate /etc via NFS/local disk. The mounted-over partition need not be the same as the mounting partition. This would seem to cover the bases of needing to mount over /etc while a file it "contained" was in use... Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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