Posts in linux

Debian with unionfs root

I wanted to make a virtual machine that has a root that is immutable - when booted, it would have a tmpfs for all files, and then when reboots, everything goes back to normal. I set this up before the read-only root filesystem, but the use case is slightly different here. I want a way to test things on the internet, without going through my home network, more lightweight than making/snapshotting and deleting a VM every time. It might also be useful when you want a system that is mostly normal but home directories are in memory.

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Notes on Debian with a read-only root

I run several Raspberry Pis for home servers. They currently use SD cards for their root filesystems (the actual data is stored either on USB disks on NVMe disks), and I wanted a way to preserve the life of the SD cards. Can I make them more like an appliance, that just works and only rarely gets updates, rather than a normal server that’s always writing to disk.

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