Hello everyone, if there is another post somewhere about this please just point it out to me. I couldnt find one. I want to se up my linux filesystem partition read-only. my fstab looks like this:

# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
/dev/hdc1 / ext2 noauto,ro 0 1
/dev/hdc2 /mnt/temp ext3 defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts defaults 0 0

and i have a symbolic link in var, so that the logs get written in mnt/temp, which i want to be read write.

ln -s /mnt/temp/log /var/log

it seems that the only time i can get the system to see that i want it read only is when i take out the rc.sysinit file. is there a way to boot up properly then change the filesystem to read only after the boot up process does all of its writing?? should i change rc.sysinit to mount the filesystem read only, if so, what should alter there? thanks

yes you can do it, but it will take some tinkering. the tinkering depends on your linux distro. i've done it with debian. its probably harder with redhat.

you need a writeable area for /var and other writeable files. you can either use a ramdisk or another partition on your drive. in a perfect world, all the writeable files would be in /var, but legacy dies hard and there is stuff in /etc that must be writeable. here's a list to get you going:

symbolic link the following files to a writeable area:
/var
/tmp
/etc/mtab
/etc/network/ifstate (this is the location for debian, there's probably something similar for other distros)
/etc/adjtime
/etc/resolv.conf
/dev/log
/lib/modules/*/modules.dep (depmod wants to run at boot time which writes out the module dependency tree)

you'll also find that you have to tinker with the /etc/rc.d boot scripts. they tend to do weird things like set permissions on the /dev/tty* files, etc.

be prepared to spend a couple hours to a couple days tinkering depending on your linux skill level, but in general it can be made to work.

ok, THANKS ill continue working with it, im using fedora. I can get it to boot up and mount the other drive and get the symbolic links to work just not read only. in my rc.local i use a remount command to mount it read only, there still seems to be something mounting it read write. im guessing its the rc.sysinit. thanks again.

there is also a required option to lilo to make the root fileshstem read-only.

in /etc/lilo.conf:
image=..../vmlinuz
root=/dev/hdc1
label=linux
read-only

if you use grub there is probably something similar, but i'm not sure.