zfs partition for /etc?

[illoai at gmail.com]

On 23 April 2011 13:00, Chris Telting <christopher-ml at telting.org> wrote:
> I'm using PC-BSD and ZFS.  ZFS is outstanding.  Somewhat less impressed with
> PCBSD.
. . .
> So so on to my question.  I'm sure others have thought about this.  I kind
> of want /etc to be it's own zfs partition so that I can snapshot it separate
> from everything else and preserve it without much effort.  But I don't think
> I can do that because of booting.  The system depends on /etc before it
> mounts it's first file system.  Same issue I experienced a couple years back
> when I tried to do unionfs on /etc. Is it possible to mount multiple
> partitions from the kernel read only for single user mode and bootup? I
> almost feel like there should be an fstab for /boot just to be able to do
> something like this.
>
> I want to be able to snapshot and rollback my base system in seconds.  Since
> I use separate volumes for /usr and /var I'll accept using a script.  My
> only thought is to generate and archive diffs for /etc though another
> modular script to match snapshot labels.

I'm not sure why /etc applies any differently than rolling back
or snapshotting all of /, of course I don't know anything about
your installation, but /etc might run to 1.3M on a really bad day.

I also don't change /etc but rarely, maybe once a year, outside
of occasionally fiddling allscreens_flags in /etc/rc.conf.

The pain and potential for breakage seems hardly worth the
benefits, to me.

(as an aside, I think most of the configuration business in /boot
, specifically loader.conf, could simply be moved to /etc, but it's
not a problem I'd bother to fix.  It's an order of magnitude less
irritating than the spaghetti in most any linux machine's /etc q.v.)

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