[Voyage-linux] package installation on ro filesystem

[Gustin Johnson]

It depends on the package.  Usually everything under /usr and /var
which is pretty much most of the system.  Apt uses /var
(/var/cache/apt).  Depending on the package, the common locations are
/usr/lib /usr/share, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, kernels also need to write
to /boot.  Depending on the where the package stores it's
configuration files you will probably need /etc as well.

The obvious question to me is why can you not remount-rw dynamically?

The other question I would ask is webmin really a requirement for
system updates?  If so the ideal approach in my mind is trigger the
remount-r? scripts from webmin.  I have not used webmin in close to a
decade, but I seem to remember it being easy to trigger scripts from
webmin (ie. have a button that runs remount-rw/ro or have it do that
before updating).

If none of those are options then you may be easier to simply prevent
the machine from going into ro mode, which is trivial to do.  My dev
box is like this (though I still can run remount-ro manually to test
my customizations).

In cases where some sort of web GUI is required (for cases where
non-technical people will be managing these devices) we will use
OpenWRT on our Alix boards.  It works quite well.  Most of the time we
use voyage since we prefer SSH (over any kind of http/https solution),
love that we have a full Debian environment under the hood, and are
not afraid of the CLI.

Hth,

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 7:09 AM, Jeff Ramin <jeff.ramin at singlewire.com> wrote:
>
> Hi folks.
>
> Anybody know which directories need to be writable when installing
> packages? I'm running webmin on my voyage machine, and that's how
> packages are installed; I need to add the needed directories to
> /etc/default/voyage-util since I can't run remountrw dynamically.
>
> Thanks.
>
> --
> Jeff Ramin
> Software Engineer
> Singlewire Software
> 2601 W Beltline Hwy #510
> Madison, WI 53713
>
> Phone Direct - 608.661.1172
> www.singlewire.com
>
>
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