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Old 16th May 2008
DarkEnergy DarkEnergy is offline
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Default /etc on a separate partition

Hi,

I had to reinstall FBSD and wanted to setupt /etc on a separate partition. The Setup run fine. But after reboot the root partition coudn't be mounetd.
The boot process stoped with the prompt mountroot>. I gave him root ... and the system booted. I wanted to take a look in /etc/fstab but there was no such file, and the /etc was empty. Can somebody explain to me why is impossible to set /etc on separate partition ?

Thans DarkEnergy
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Old 16th May 2008
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Did you put the new /etc information in fstab before you rebooted?
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Old 16th May 2008
DarkEnergy DarkEnergy is offline
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nope ...
hmm interesting. I'll try this in a virtual machine. FBSD is running now but /etc is just a directory under /
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Old 16th May 2008
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when the OS boots it (kernel) knows where the root filesystem is. it reads /etc/fstab to mount the filesystems. obviously, the file /etc/fstab needs to be on the root filesystem or to put it in another way /etc can't be on a seperate filesystem.
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Old 16th May 2008
adamk adamk is offline
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Theoretically, couldn't you have an /etc directory on the root slice with just /etc/fstab in it? And that /etc/fstab would contain the slice to mount on /etc ? It's an awful, awful, hack, something I would never recommend, but it would probably work.
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Old 16th May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by adamk View Post
Theoretically, couldn't you have an /etc directory on the root slice with just /etc/fstab in it? And that /etc/fstab would contain the slice to mount on /etc ? It's an awful, awful, hack, something I would never recommend, but it would probably work.
init runs /etc/rc which will further run other rc scripts that will mount all the non-root FS's. but /etc/rc is on a filesystem that hasn't been mounted yet.
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Old 16th May 2008
adamk adamk is offline
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So it could be done if you copied /etc/rc and various other files under /etc to the unmounted /etc. Which makes it completely pointless :-)
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Old 16th May 2008
BSDfan666 BSDfan666 is offline
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/etc should always be on the root partition, a simple fact.. sorry..
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Old 16th May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DarkEnergy View Post
I had to reinstall FBSD and wanted to setupt /etc on a separate partition.
Any good reason for that mate?
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Old 16th May 2008
J65nko J65nko is offline
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Just for fun I tried creating a separate partition/label for "/etc" on OpenBSD a few years ago. It didn't work.
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Old 19th May 2008
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/etc contains all the configuration info for the OS. How do you expect an OS to boot when it can't find any of its configuration info?
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Old 19th May 2008
richardpl richardpl is offline
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Also size of /etc is few megabytes and making special partition/slice for it is clueless.
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Old 20th May 2008
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The only time I could think there would be a point to /etc not being on / is if it was mounted *read only* over NFS and shared on a large group of machines or some thing to that effect.


In which case I would guess people would want to eventually read the diskless operation parts of the handbook.


Or just rsync /etc via ssh ontop of a minimal /etc.
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Old 20th May 2008
kazcor kazcor is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TerryP View Post
Or just rsync /etc via ssh ontop of a minimal /etc.
Or export an image via NFS and use unionfs to fill up the missing parts
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