on Sat, Jul 05, 2003 at 02:37:31PM -0500, Brian McGroarty (brian@mcgroarty.net) wrote:
> This may be a silly question:
>
> Why is /etc/shadow in /etc?
Historical reasons. A consequence of which: this is where it's looked
for by many, many, many applications. Change would take years.
> Generally, applications and static data go in /usr. You could mount
> /usr read-only save when installing apps, and none of the core Debian
> applications would break.
>
> Similarly, system-wide configuration data goes in /etc. You could
> mount /etc read-only, save when reconfiguring the system. bind, dhcpd,
> exim, etc would still work, as they drop data in /var. They only
> reference /etc for their initial configuration data.
This is not quite true. There are several 'status' files in /etc, most
notably /etc/mtab, also some networking files if you're using dialup
(ppp) configuration.
There is a long history of _informed_ discussion of the topic of both
slimming down /etc (several packages, among them perl and X, dump tons
of stuff under /etc which would better be served in /lib), and allowin
it to be mounted readonly (largely for highly secure or run-from-cdrom
or other nonvolatile storage implementations).
Several solutions to the dynamic data issues have been presented,
including symlinks and/or union mounts (borrowed from BSD) which allow
access to dynamic data by legacy apps despite a read-only FS.
You're strongly advised to research this discussion thoroughly before
raising further questions here.
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Backgrounder on the Caldera/SCO vs. IBM and Linux dispute.
http://sco.iwethey.org/
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