Re: [gentoo-dev] GNAP 1.7 Release (Gentoo Network APpliance)

[Thierry Carrez <koon@gentoo.org>]

Chris Gianelloni wrote:

>>R/W overlay
>>It is now possible to specify the name of a partition from which to
>>overlay files at boot-time, allowing to write configuration changes back
>>to a floppy or a specific CF partition for example.
> 
> Just curious, but what did you do to do this?  I'm going to guess
> there's some boot-time option to mount a unionfs, no?  Is this something
> we can extend to genkernel to allow us to have configurable LiveCD
> releases, or is it something that is GNAP-specific?

Oh no. I just found out about unionfs very recently, thanks to solar.

The current implementation is completely manual (and asynchronous) : the
contents of the partition is overlaid over the live filesystem at boot,
and you can remount the partition later on to save modified files. The
idea is to backup some /etc and /var things that you want to keep over a
reboot.

What is GNAP-specific, though, is the idea to add a tarball to a LiveCD
and have an init script overlay files over the filesystem at boot. This
allows user-level customization of the LiveCD configuration files in
seconds. The "R/W overlay" feature is just there to avoid burning a new
LiveCD whenever you change a conf file.

-- 
Koon
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