Mix between a rant and a quetion, about FreeBSD...

[Nothinman]

That's the whole point of FreeBSD's hierarchy. Nothing that needs frequently written to is contained in /etc. Have /etc read-only is a great way to make a
box a bit more secure. That way someone can't use some sort of root exploit to put a command in the crontab, or rc.conf for example.

FreeBSD can't dynamically remount partitions? In Linux I can just type 'mount -o remount,rw /' and it'll remount / read-write without a need for reboot. If I have root, I can do that and put whatever I want in your rc.conf.

/usr/home always seemed dumb to me, if you have users using the machine regularly /home should be a sperate partition anyway, putting it on /usr or / is a bad idea.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

That's the whole point of FreeBSD's hierarchy. Nothing that needs frequently written to is contained in /etc. Have /etc read-only is a great way to make a
box a bit more secure. That way someone can't use some sort of root exploit to put a command in the crontab, or rc.conf for example.

FreeBSD can't dynamically remount partitions? In Linux I can just type 'mount -o remount,rw /' and it'll remount / read-write without a need for reboot. If I have root, I can do that and put whatever I want in your rc.conf.

/usr/home always seemed dumb to me, if you have users using the machine regularly /home should be a sperate partition anyway, putting it on /usr or / is a bad idea.

not sure about freebsd, but here's from netbsd's mount(8):

-u The -u flag indicates that the status of an already mounted file
system should be changed. Any of the options discussed above
(the -o option) may be changed; also a file system can be changed
from read-only to read-write or vice versa. An attempt to change
from read-write to read-only will fail if any files on the
filesystem are currently open for writing unless the -f flag is
also specified. The set of options is determined by first ex-
tracting the options for the file system from the fstab(5) file,
then applying any options specified by the -o argument, and fi-
nally applying the -r or -w option.




i'm with sunner on the whole /usr/home issue. i don't get it, it *could* be dumb, but there could also be some benefit, i've just never had it explained to me. always keeping an open mind...

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

That's the whole point of FreeBSD's hierarchy. Nothing that needs frequently written to is contained in /etc. Have /etc read-only is a great way to make a
box a bit more secure. That way someone can't use some sort of root exploit to put a command in the crontab, or rc.conf for example.

FreeBSD can't dynamically remount partitions? In Linux I can just type 'mount -o remount,rw /' and it'll remount / read-write without a need for reboot. If I have root, I can do that and put whatever I want in your rc.conf.

/usr/home always seemed dumb to me, if you have users using the machine regularly /home should be a sperate partition anyway, putting it on /usr or / is a bad idea.

Pretty much my thinking, if you're used to FreeBSD's way I suppose it ain't a problem, but Im not.
In this case Im the only user, so it's not a problem, but I can see how it could be, and as I've said, for no good reason I can think of.