diskless: meaning of conf/base ?

[Brooks Davis]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 10:31:43AM +0200, Marco Molteni wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> lately I have been playing with diskless booting with 6.x and 7.x.
> I understand how the whole /conf overriding mechanism works, and
> I think it is useful.
> 
> What I am missing is the usefulness of conf/base, especially 
> conf/base/etc, that diskless(8) suggests to fill with the same
> etc in $disklessroot/etc.
> 
> Let me say it in another way:
> 
> conf/default/etc/ contains the overrides
> conf/base/etc/    contains the base etc that is overridden by the
>                   files in default/etc
> 
> since anyway below $disklessroot we have an already existing etc:
> $disklessroot/ect/, and since the normal way to initialize conf/base/etc
> is:
> 
> cp -Rp $disklessroot/etc/ $disklessroot/conf/base/etc
> 
> So we get 3 copies of etc that need to be kept synchronized:
> 
> /etc
> $disklessroot/etc
> $disklessroot/conf/base/etc

/etc and $disklessroot/etc do not necessarily have any relation.

> why do we need $disklessroot/conf/base/etc at all?

What should we use instead?  You can't just use $disklessroot/etc
because you have to remount it or copy it somewhere before mounting the
mfs over /etc.  Using some sort of loopback mount is a good option to
avoid sync issues, but there are many ways to do it so the user needs to
make that decision.

> I know that there is the possibility to use 
> conf/base/etc/diskless_remount to avoid filling conf/base/etc, but
> anyway, my question remains. diskless_remount could be moved to,
> say, /conf.

Using diskless_remount to mount /conf would not addresses this.

I use /conf/diskless_remount to allow me to share /conf directories
between roots.  I then use /conf/base/etc/diskless_remount
to pick use the /etc of the root.

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
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