On Wed, 2004-03-31 at 23:38, Havoc Pennington wrote:
A possibly related discussion; we've been wondering if we can make the OS image read-only (mounting it that way, or via selinux).
If we do this, apt/yum/up2date/rpm will also need smarts to remount rw when upgrading. Having to do this by hand each time would annoy the hell out of me enough to just make it permanently rw again.
Then have /tmp and probably /var in RAM (or wiped on boot)
Errr, if /var/log disappeared, I'd be very annoyed.
Ditto /var/spool. Imagine a scenario where I had a few hundred emails in /var/spool/mqueue, and for some reason the box locked up. Right now, I can reboot, and they'll still be there, and I can just restart the MTA and everything carries on. With your proposal, that spool is *gone*.
Same is possibly true for other bits of /var too.
This allows you to maintain the OS image in a central location and the homedirs and server/app data in central locations, and have a single network-wide master copy of all important state.
This sounds problematic for laptops. Things like AFS sound like a solution, but from what I've heard about it, I'm not sure I'm ready to trust my /home to it.
Dave