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I have a device that mounts its root file system using NFS. On my NFS server I have a file representing the device's file system, namely target.ext2, which I mount on the appropriate /export directory.

I would like the device to be able to write on the mounted directory, but didn't want that the changes made to it to be propagated to the target.ext2 file. Is it possible?

Thiago Cardoso
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3 Answers3

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If you are willing to reconsider a change in your architecture, you should be able to get something like that using a logical volume instead of a loopback file.

If you want to give it a try, first convert your file to a logical volume:

lvcreate -n original -L 20G vg0 # assumes 20G size and a valid 'vg0' volume group
dd if=/root/original.loopback of=/dev/vg0/original

Then create a snapshot:

lvcreate -s -n volatilecopy -L 2G /dev/vg0/original

Now you can mount /dev/vg0/volatilecopy and "write" up to 2GB on it without running into problems, yet /dev/vg0/original will remain unchanged.

Afterwards:

lvremove /dev/vg0/volatilecopy
lvcreate -s -n volatilecopy -L 2G /dev/vg0/original

Gives you a clean state again.

Advantages over copying the file over and over again: this uses less space (you only need extra space for the writes) and is quicker.

Eduardo Ivanec
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Sorry I missed this question in the past... Try using a "Fanout" filesystem which will allow you to mount an "image" and then overlay a writable file-system on-top of the non-writable image. All writes to the drive will result in the "modifications" being done to the overlaying filesystem instead of the base-iamge. mini-fo is one such filesystem which will allow you to do this.

TheCompWiz
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  • That's what I was after. [mini-fo](http://www.denx.de/wiki/bin/view/Know/MiniFOHome) is quite old and seems unsupported. I couldn't compile it against my kernel (2.6.35) and I read that it was replaced by [UnionFS](http://tcos.org/project-unionfs.html) in OpenWRT. In ended up using [aufs](http://aufs.sourceforge.net/) which is replacing UnionFS. – Thiago Cardoso Apr 14 '11 at 21:43
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Not to my knowledge, short of a custom script that is called to reset the image from a master copy and remounting.

Any particular reason you want to allow writes to a folder without propagating the changes back to the file system? Seems it would easier to make the file system read-only, and then have the users write elsewhere for changes that should be kept.

rfelsburg
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  • I thought of a script like you said, but wondered if I could do this with mount options. I want to be able to play around on the device, but didn't want to save those changes. Sort of a RAM disk. – Thiago Cardoso Apr 11 '11 at 15:20
  • Not directly via nfs, however why not just make a copy of the image, play around then restore the image? Or do you mean, you want to consistently be able to workaround without saving changes? – rfelsburg Apr 11 '11 at 15:33
  • It's a valid approach, but I didn't want to be "managing" the files. – Thiago Cardoso Apr 12 '11 at 17:53