On Tue, 10 Aug 2010, Edmund R. MacKenty wrote:
I'm still wondering what RPM issues with read-only
filesystems have been solved. Russ, are there any docs you
can point us to on that? I ended up doing essentially what
you suggested: letting an admin maintain software on one
system using RPM, and having my tool distributing those
changes to the many Linux instances it has created, dealing
with R/O filesystems in its own way.
Some of the the live CD [really, live ISO images] creation
tools leave the RPMDB present and intact, even though on RO
media, particularly when that live CD (DVD). The process is
merely laborious, and once solved readily scriptable, as you
and others have noted as in the nicely comprehensive RedBooks
mentioned yesterday
Install into a DD'd base image, having suitable -bind
mounted visibility into /proc/ dev, and /sys
under a 2.6 kernel
Fix up mount points that need to be RW, to be such
Toss a link out of the RO FS for /etc/mtab ;)
Adjust the (custom) initrd scripts to do:
- rsyncs, cp -a, or other relocations of
content that needs to be RW, during the
phase one boot
(tmpfs is wonderful here)
- does the mounts of RW partitions
- perhaps do path munges so that the
/bin and /sbin/ within the RO come at
the end of the search paths under
different path names, so that transient
or machine image specific rpm updates
in the RW space take precedence (ditto
libraries -- this is where managing
the variant distribution part gets
tricky
and of course, Rinse, Test, and Repeat
-- Russ herrold
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