[Voyage-linux] Mount /rw on usb drive: how?

[Giuseppe Barichello]

Hi all,

I just installed Voyage Linux on an Alix board. Nice distribution
indeed!
Since I'll be using this board as an Asterisk PBX, I'd like to make /rw
stuff permanent without writing to the ro-partition (hda1 Compact
Flash). So I planned to use an usb pen drive (/dev/sda1) as partition
to write to.

What I did was editing /etc/fstab like this:
#/dev/hda1      /        ext2    defaults,noatime,rw 0 0
proc            /proc    proc    defaults            0 0
#tmpfs          /rw      tmpfs   defaults,size=8M    0 0
/dev/sda1       /rw      ext2    auto,defaults,rw    0 0

now I get 2 problems:
1) /dev/sda1 is not mounted on boot (even if the hardware is correctly
recognized and mount -a works after boot)
voyage:~# dmesg |grep sda 
SCSI device sda: 4014078 512-byte hdwr sectors (2055 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
SCSI device sda: 4014078 512-byte hdwr sectors (2055 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 03 00 00 00
sda: assuming drive cache: write through
 sda: sda1
sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi removable disk sda

2) /dev/hda1 is always mounted rw (remountro doesn't work, it complains
"/ is busy")

Replacing /etc/fstab with the original version and rebooting puts
everything in order, even remountrw/remountro work again.

Any hint?

Thanks in advance,

Giuseppe