[H-GEN] Need help during install, or just after ;)

Martin Pool mbp at meesha.humbug.org.au
Thu Jun 11 06:53:51 EDT 1998


>/ Should not be readonly as many /etc files (passwd for example) need to
>be written to.

Well, yes and no.  A machine set up as a web server with only
a couple of interactive logins -- and there must be at least 
thousands of them in the world -- can get by pretty happily 
with / read-only.  Of course, you need to remount it to 
change stuff, but on a very-stable production machine that 
might be OK.  It's near the end of the security-vs-convenience
spectrum.

I guess passwd really ought to be in /var, but it's about 
twenty years too late to say that. :-/

>I don't like that due to the speed issues associated with crossing a
>symlink everytime u go to /tmp (assuming it is the link to /var/tmp).
>Zen is doing this right now as an interim measure however.

Naturally there is some loss, but symlinks are quite fast on
some unices: the kernel caches the link and it's target, and so
on.  I don't know about recent versions of Linux.

--
Martin



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