Re: Questions about filesystem choice

["Ian D. Leroux" <idleroux%fastmail.fm@localhost>]

On Wed, 02 Jun 2010 04:22 -0400, "matthew sporleder"
<msporleder%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 9:01 PM, DL <devinlasalle%hotmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> I wrote the following to reduce disk access if you're not going to try
> and go full read-only:
> http://www.mspo.com/netbsdreadmostly.html

It's also not terribly difficult to set up a system where / (and /usr
for that matter) are mounted read-only nearly all the time (except when
editing configuration files).  The information on how to do this is a
bit scattered; I've been meaning to write up how I did it on 5.0.2.  As
a stopgap, here are a few notes I took on the major points:

# To have init mount /dev on a tmpfs
mv /dev /dev-old
mkdir /dev
chmod 755 /dev
cp -p /dev-old/MAKEDEV* /dev  # this step is crucial, recent NetBSD
won't boot if the MAKEDEV files aren't found
# after the next reboot you can remove /dev-old

echo update_motd=NO >> /etc/rc.conf # since /etc is going to be
read-only most of the time
# you might want to remove the kernel version line in /etc/motd before
it becomes obsolete

# if your network configuration is coming from dhcp, make sure
/etc/resolv.conf is a symlink to someplace writable

# if you'll be running sshd, run
/etc/rc.d/sshd start
# while / is writable so that it gets a change to generate keypairs and
store them

Hope that helps,

Ian Leroux