Mount as many partitions as possible read only (what do I do with /etc?)

[Enrico Zini <zinie@cs.unibo.it>]

Hello!

In order to improve reliability, reduce fsck times, increase foolproofness,
preserve the wildlife and so on (on a Debian Slink server with a
Very Interruptible Power Supply (tm)), I wish to mount read only as many
partitions as I can.

My goal would be to have everything read only except /var, /home and /tmp.

It's trivial to have /usr read-only, but I have problems with the root
partition:

 - It has to contain /etc since it's required at early boot time to run rc
   scripts
 - /etc has to be read-write since you have to be able to change passwords, add
   and remove users, configure samba shares via swat, update adjtime, mtab and
   so on.

What's The Right Way (tm) to have / mounted read-only?

 
TIA, Enrico

--
GPG public key available on finger -l zinie@cs.unibo.it