Thread: Mounting Linux read-only

journaled file systems arnt safe from improper shutdown , but ext3 is pretty damn bullet proof. what you could do is boot into a ram disk (your root file system reside on a ram disk) and mount the hd file systems read only , then it would be impossible to shag up your fs. if you wanted to write something to disk you could unmount then remount read/write , then umount and remount read only , and that would be the only time improper shutdown would be bad , and you have control over that part to a certain extent (short of hardware failure).
a lot of mini distros do just this , and i have set my machine (k5 133 with 16 meg ram) up using mulinux and that could play 3 128 kb/sec mp3 at once while running an ftp deamon and other services.
apparently this is fairly straight forward to do (i havent done it myself , the distros do it by default) which is good

(the only prob with mulinux is that its based on an older kernel and libc5 so coding for it is a bit of a prick)

oh and the root file system has to be mounted read write , or at least /proc has to be read write (interesting directory that one , info about running procedures and your hardware irq etc....).

"but they are supposed to help set your machine up to boot off a ramdisk "

no i am talking about booting of a hd , and setting up a ram drive using the system memory and mounting that read/write , and mounting other filesystems (residing on the hard disk) read only. im not talking about one of those (cool arse) solid state memory drives , although on want one
it dosent matter if that isnt unmounted cleanly as its set up every time you boot. its probably only an option when everything is set up right because it can be i wee bit annoying to change the setup on disk....

I don't remeber how to do it, but go look over at the Cajun website, it explains it.

oh sorry dude. anyway i will have to look at thise scripts , i will be doing something like this myself soon and best i understand how to do it befor i try it