[TriLUG] Read-only Filesystems for executables/libraries

[Errol Casey]

Was wondering what folks experiences have been in trying to
use read-only file systems.

I have a setup where multiple users, access shared executables
via a read-only mounted file system.  I'm just remounting an existing
Linux file system to a different mount point, with "ro" options.

This works well, until I need to make a change to the underlying file
system. I can remount it "rw", and make changes but if I need to unmount
the main directory then it affects all the "other mounts".

Is there away, a similar setup could be done with loopback devices? If so how
would it be setup? I have only used Linux loopback for mounting ISO images.
Is there a maximum number of loopback mounts that a Linux machine can have?

Would NFS mounting to the "local" machine, work any better? wouldn't their be
security issues by starting NFS and requiring additional overhead such as portmap, 
etc. or could a firewall be used to limit access to the NFS to local machine?

Just curious, what others have done along these lines.



-- 
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