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

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    lifefilesystemcardlogend
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    • CharlesC Offline
      Charles
      last edited by

      @Gregor-Ratajc
      Thanks for the tip, I updated the tuturial according driftfile 😉

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      • CharlesC Offline
        Charles
        last edited by

        I also updated to avoid the random-seed file problem

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        • B Offline
          Bruce Aldridge
          last edited by

          I've used this multiple times, great resource.
          One thing that could be made clearer is the tmpfs additions to fstab, I missed them and couldn't ssh in

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          • C Offline
            Christian Ferbar
            last edited by

            Thanks a lot for this tutorial!
            On debian jessie /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/var.conf chmods /var/spool to 0755. This means that /tmp is changed to 0755 as well because we changed /var/spool to point to /tmp. So the /var/spool line in /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/var.conf has to be commented out.
            /run and /run/lock are tmpfs already, maybe they are better softlink targets than /tmp.

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            • X Offline
              xproto
              last edited by

              @Bruce Aldridge
              I cannot SSH too, to my RPi. What I did is I created a symlink for sshd

              ln -s /tmp /var/run/sshd

              Great article btw Charles! :). Thanks!

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              • X Offline
                xproto
                last edited by

                Update: My mistake I missed the sysmlink for /var/run.

                No need for my first comment.

                v
                v
                v

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                • J Offline
                  Joo
                  last edited by

                  Hello,
                  There is a (rather new) Olimex single board card with onboard 4GB eMMC MLC/SLC Flash
                  Do you think this could be an answer to the corruption of data for an always on card ?
                  (with regular backup...of cours...) or the problem is not related to SD card ???
                  thx.

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                  • N Offline
                    notmichael
                    last edited by

                    I tried this tutorial twice and both times couldn't SSH in after the final reboot. I found this tutorial a little more helpful - http://petr.io/en/blog/2015/11/09/read-only-raspberry-pi-with-jessie/. I susptec the difference was the part they mentione specifically enables SSH after changing these settings. That tutorial also makes it a little more clear that you have to add three lines in /etc/fstab, not just add ro twice.

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                    • I Offline
                      Ing.Fernando
                      last edited by

                      Hi I successfully made my Pi Zero v 1.3 Read Mode, but a problem came up when I was trying to connect to internet with a 3g usb dongle.

                      First, the modem get connected to internet, but after a minute or less, it losed the connection, and then it reconnects, and the same story was looping forever.

                      After thinking, the problem was the DNS, because when the modem connects to internet, it changes the default DNS and tried to write the new DNS to the default file, here is the problem, the modem didn't notice that he cant write to the SD!

                      I took the solution from here: https://github.com/emoncms/emoncms/blob/master/docs/RaspberryPi/read-only.md

                      touch /tmp/resolv.conf
                      sudo rm /etc/resolv.conf
                      sudo ln -s /tmp/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf

                      touch /tmp/resolv.conf.dhclient-new
                      sudo chmod 777 /tmp/resolv.conf.dhclient-new
                      sudo rm /etc/resolv.conf.dhclient-new
                      sudo ln -s /tmp/resolv.conf.dhclient-new /etc/resolv.conf.dhclient-new

                      sudo mv /sbin/dhclient-script /sbin/dhclient-script_original
                      sudo ln -s /home/pi/emonpi/dhclient-script_raspbian_jessielite /sbin/dhclient-script

                      Then rebooted and all worked fine, the 3g modem connected to the internet and never disconnected, then I successfully SSH with weaved.com service.

                      After that another problem came up, my system is a GPS tracker for public transport, so there is a GPS module in my system, and the GPS was not working for the same reason as the 3g modem.

                      I'm using a "Ublox Neo 6m GPS" and GPSD to get the required information.

                      When GPSD run at boot it tryes to write a configuration file to open the stream, but it cant because the Pi is in read mode, so we need to put in that file what GPSD write at boot.

                      To solve this, just edit this file: /etc/default/gpsd

                      Then edit as this:

                      START_DAEMON="true"
                      GPSD_OPTIONS="-n"
                      DEVICES="/dev/ttyAMA0" #My GPS is connected via UART, change if yours is via USB or whatelse
                      USBAUTO="true"
                      GPSD_SOCKET="/var/run/gpsd.sock"

                      Finally reboot and all will work fine.

                      So, if you are having a problem with a sensor or what else, first verify if the program who communicates with it needs to write sometime to the SD.

                      Thank you and greetings from Mexico!!!

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                      • F Offline
                        FBorges
                        last edited by

                        Hi !

                        I've tried to complete tour tutorial but when I do the step "Move some system files to temp filesystem", I've detected that it result on a dbus problem that when the Raspberry is rebooted It can resolve the dhcp and hostname service.

                        Can anyone help me please?

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                        • C Offline
                          cfreund
                          last edited by

                          need to change UPEX4C_autoconfigfil in /usr/sbin/update-exim4.conf

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                          • W Offline
                            willn
                            last edited by

                            Will brick your Pi if you're running the new PIXEL distro. Any idea what's causing this?

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                            • D Offline
                              dgatwood
                              last edited by

                              You should really add some commentary about the tmpfs lines in /etc/fstab before the code listing. When I got to that step, I read that we were ready to set the volume to read-only, and thought, "I know how to do that," and stopped reading at that point, resulting in an unbootable system. I'd imagine many other folks with sysadmin experience will do the same. Actually, you should probably add the tmpfs lines first before you start making changes that depend on them, then make the changes, then change fstab a second time to make it read-only. Also, for Jessie, the systemd changes are unnecessary, because /run is already a tmpfs volume. And it might be worth redirecting things from /var/run to /run just for simplicity (on Jessie).

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                              • B Offline
                                Bruno Duarte
                                last edited by

                                How to fix this ?

                                pi@raspberrypi(ro):~$ reboot
                                Failed to execute operation: The name org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1 was not provided by any .service files
                                Must be root.

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                                • M Offline
                                  mjeanne
                                  last edited by

                                  you need to be root..
                                  use 'sudo'

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                                  • M Offline
                                    mocart2
                                    last edited by

                                    Hello! Can anybody help me with user crontab file? I have problem: i installed raspbian in Read-only mode, i have some scripts, (cron jobs) that works every 5 minutes, 10 etc. I set it by crontab -e command, but after reboot, system is clean it, i think, because i moved /var/spool dir to tmpfs (like howto), and user cronjob file stored at /var/spool/cron/crontabs dir. How i can fix it for not clearing after system reboot? Thanks!

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                                    • C Offline
                                      Cavallonzio
                                      last edited by

                                      Did anyone figured out how to use crontab? it is wiped after reboot and i really need it 😞

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                                      • CharlesC Offline
                                        Charles
                                        last edited by

                                        We need to put the system into Read Write Mode before changing the crontab
                                        If you followed this tuto should be something like that

                                        sudo mount -o remount,rw /
                                        

                                        Then edit your crontab

                                        sudo crontab -e
                                        

                                        put pack in Read Only or reboot

                                        sudo mount -o remount,ro /
                                        
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                                        • Damian MacD Offline
                                          Damian Mac
                                          last edited by

                                          Charles you are going wrong. crontab -e give us file on /tmp which has been deleted on boot. We need to go this way:
                                          rw
                                          sudo su
                                          nano /etc/crontab (dont forget to add user) example below:

                                                  • root /usr/bin/vpncheck.sh > /dev/null 2>&1
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                                          • N Offline
                                            Neoromantic
                                            last edited by

                                            Hello Charles,
                                            I was wondering if I don't have entry about /tmp being a mount entry point for tmpfs neither in fstab nor mtab, what would be the point in moving things there? Am I missing something or?
                                            I am playing with Raspberry PI-2 and Raspbian Jessie.

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