I have a system - one that is not expandable - that has relatively limited RAM, comparatively speaking, and must boot from a usb stick. The system hosts a RAID array, but one cannot assume the RAID array is available when the system boots. IOW, I want to be able to take down the RAID array for maintenance, possibly booting the system with no array created, at all. On the other hand, USB sticks have a limited number of writes available before they fail, so I don't want the system to be thrashing the flash drive any more than necessary. At this time, I have /var/run, /var/log, /var/lock, and /tmp mounted as tmpfs file systems. What I propose is to run an init script that checks to see if the array is mounted, and if so appends files in the aforementioned directories to existing directories on the array and then remounts and binds the directories on the array. The stop call in the script will reverse the process so the system can shutdown or so I can take the array offline after booting for maintenance. Is this unwise? Am I missing something crucial that might cause the system to blow up?
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