on Sat, Jul 05, 2003 at 02:37:31PM -0500, Brian McGroarty ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > This may be a silly question: > > Why is /etc/shadow in /etc?
Historical reasons. A consequence of which: this is where it's looked for by many, many, many applications. Change would take years. > Generally, applications and static data go in /usr. You could mount > /usr read-only save when installing apps, and none of the core Debian > applications would break. > > Similarly, system-wide configuration data goes in /etc. You could > mount /etc read-only, save when reconfiguring the system. bind, dhcpd, > exim, etc would still work, as they drop data in /var. They only > reference /etc for their initial configuration data. This is not quite true. There are several 'status' files in /etc, most notably /etc/mtab, also some networking files if you're using dialup (ppp) configuration. There is a long history of _informed_ discussion of the topic of both slimming down /etc (several packages, among them perl and X, dump tons of stuff under /etc which would better be served in /lib), and allowin it to be mounted readonly (largely for highly secure or run-from-cdrom or other nonvolatile storage implementations). Several solutions to the dynamic data issues have been presented, including symlinks and/or union mounts (borrowed from BSD) which allow access to dynamic data by legacy apps despite a read-only FS. You're strongly advised to research this discussion thoroughly before raising further questions here. Peace. -- Karsten M. Self <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Backgrounder on the Caldera/SCO vs. IBM and Linux dispute. http://sco.iwethey.org/
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