Roy's Techblog

One of the things that has bugged me for ages is that /etc is a combination of system files and local configuration files…

I don’t think it should be both!

At lunch today, a colleague and I discussed the idea of making /etc system-only files, and union mounting it with a directory to hold locally modified files.

I’m going to have to try this to see if it works. If it does, then perhaps its time to adopt a new way to manage /etc for FreeBSD.

It turns out that this works, and very well! The only trick is upgrading. And removing files… I’ll have to try using below-mounts and relocating the real /etc to a different directory, and having /etc be the local modifications but with the system /etc/accessible.