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    Protect your Raspberry PI SD card, use Read-Only filesystem

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    • Charles
      Charles last edited by Charles

      Today I decided to protect all my Raspberry Pi SD cards from unproper shutdown and also prevent SD card premature end of life. This means protect them from power outage or just unplugging the power while the Pi is running.… Continue Reading

      Click here to see the full blog post

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      • H
        hwleijp last edited by

        Very cool. What is the version of your pi ? Have you tried for RaspPi2 with version 8?

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        • Charles
          Charles last edited by

          Thanks for your comment,

          I've done this on latest Raspbian (not sure if it's the one you're calling V8) on PI, PI B+ and PI V2 😉

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          • F
            fcatuhe last edited by

            What are the limitations for using Read-Only filesystem on a Pi? For example, will node-red work flawlessly? And a domotic solution like Domoticz or Jeedom?

            Thanks in advance.

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            • Charles
              Charles last edited by

              @fcatuhe
              yes of course there's some limitation with RO filesystem, especially with system using databases such as Jeedom or Domoticz.
              A solution would be to report database away from PI (NAS as example). But in all cases I won't recommend using Pi + database on SD card.
              For node red, yes it works, but each time you want to modify the flow the system need to be set as RW when saving the flow. Except that, it's working fine on RO filesystem

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              • A
                alwayslearning last edited by

                Hello,

                Almost two years ago I made something similar to my Pi but I lost the SD auto detect and auto mount, can you please tell me if you have the SD Auto detected functionality working while in read-only mode?

                Best regards

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                • Charles
                  Charles last edited by

                  @alwayslearning
                  I was not aware of this feature, what is this for ? to know if SD is pluuged or not ? that's a good idea but I do not use it.

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                  • A
                    alwayslearning last edited by

                    Hello, sorry it's not the SD auto detect, it's the USB auto detect and auto mount, that feature is really importante if you use your pi and wan't to simply change content or program data with a new USB stick/pen.

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                    • N
                      nicklas last edited by

                      Hello

                      Thank you very much for a very helpful tutorial!

                      I have one comment and one question.

                      I think you should mention that you also have to mount /tmp as tmpfs in /etc/fstab
                      After doing that it works like a charm.

                      But I also want samba to serve some files from my rpi. I find samba hard to handle here since it seems to need to write to some files in /var/lib/samba. When I boot with writable / it works, but not if I remount as writable after boot. If I make it writable after boot, it seems like smbd starts, but I cannot connect to the shares. What I think I have to do is create some files in /tmp at boot time maybe with tdbtool, but I don't know yet what files and if it will work. I will continue to investigate, but any time saving tips is highly appreciated :-).

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                      • N
                        nicklas last edited by

                        I think I have solved my samba problem with an ugly hack.
                        I copied everything in /var/lib/samba to a backup-folder.
                        THen I put a symlink to /tmp so /var/lib/samba is found there.

                        Then I put a line in rc.local that copies the content of my backed up /var/lib/samba back (which now points to /tmp
                        and another line starting smbd

                        Now I can connect to my shares in my read only filesystem.
                        Of course I copy only the needed files, but this was the quich and dirty version 🙂
                        I have disabled nmbd, but it should work too now I guess.

                        To not make unsuccessful appempts to start smbd before doing the copy I also disabled sbd with update-rc.d

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                        • Charles
                          Charles last edited by Charles

                          @nicklas
                          thank for the head up, this tip can help some applications not directly compatible with read only filesystem.
                          Curious you're the second telling me for tmpfs to be done in /etc/initab, may be related to jessie because I did not defined it in my fstab entrie and by default tmp goes to tmpfs.

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                          • N
                            nicklas last edited by

                            Interesting. I haven't rechecked but I had problems when /tmp wasn't mounted in /etc/fstab as tmpfs. What made me try that was the original blog post that you refer to. In his /etc/fstab is a line for /tmp, but he doesn't mention it in the text.

                            I use minibian jessie, so it is not the full raspbian distro. Don't know if that could make a difference.

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                            • Charles
                              Charles last edited by

                              Hummmm, minibian?
                              just reading the name, I like it, was searching for a minimal distro for long time, I'll try it 😉

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                              • A
                                arnt last edited by

                                Thanks for sharing this post!
                                I was able to get it forking with the RASPBIAN JESSIE LITE distro.

                                Some minor issues were solved by adding

                                tmpfs /tmp tmpfs mode=1777,nosuid,nodev 0 0
                                tmpfs /var tmpfs mode=1777,nosuid,nodev 0 0

                                to /etc/fstab

                                I used the resolvconf package for fixing some issues with dhcpcd

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                                • Charles
                                  Charles last edited by

                                  @arnt
                                  Thank, for the fixes, I really need to take time to test on jessie 😉

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                                  • I
                                    icepick last edited by

                                    What arnt wrote works indeed with Jessie (otherwise it won't boot). Does anyone know a way to still make it boot in the graphical interface? I didn't remove the xserver packages as written above.. the box boots to a black screen now (I can still ssh to it)..

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                                    • Petr Klus
                                      Petr Klus last edited by

                                      Hello!

                                      Sorry for being lazy but I would you consider providing pre-built images with all of the work above built-in? Or, alternatively, a script one can use that does all of the above?

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                                      • Petr Klus
                                        Petr Klus last edited by

                                        @arnt - what did you do with resolvconf?

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                                        • Petr Klus
                                          Petr Klus last edited by

                                          @arn I've written up instructions for Jessie inspired by this post (and many other). See here:

                                          http://petr.io/2015/11/09/read-only-raspberry-pi-with-jessie/

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                                          • Charles
                                            Charles last edited by

                                            @Petr-Klus
                                            Since I migrated to Jessie, I've updated the post according to your changes, thanks for that.

                                            I also corrected Fancy Prompt (was not working on Jessie) and ro/rw alias to also mount/remount /boot to avoid error when apt-get upgrade was upgrading also bootloader

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