/var to tmpfs

Question

Hey,
I'm running arch on a tiny homeserver with an USB pen drive as root.
Since the write cycles are limited I would like to reduce the load on the pen drive as much as possible.
Since /var is a commonly used part of the filesystem I would like to put it in to ram.
My thougts are, that I could add another init script which handles this:
On boot it creates a tmpfs e.g. to /var_tmp, copies all stuff from /var to /var_tmp, and moves the tmpfs mount point from /var_tmp to /var.
On shutdown it should do this steps in reverse order, so that no stuff gets lost.
What do you think? How could I realise that?
Thanks,
Oli

Answer 1

genisis300 wrote:
do it the other way round.
copy the contents of /var to /var_tmp
mount tmpfs to /var
copy back the contents.
Or see the link above.
what is the benefit?
i actually do it this way:
#!/bin/bash
. /etc/rc.conf
. /etc/rc.d/functions
case "$1" in
start)
stat_busy "Creating /var tmpfs"
rm -rf /tmp/var
mkdir /tmp/var
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /tmp/var -o size=500M,noatime
cp -rp /var/* /tmp/var
mount --move /tmp/var /var
rm -rf /tmp/var
add_daemon vartmpfs
stat_done
stop)
stat_busy "Syncing /var back"
rm -rf /tmp/var
mkdir /tmp/var
mount --move /var /tmp/var
rsync -a /tmp/var/* /var/
umount /tmp/var
rm -rf /tmp/var
rm_daemon vartmpfs
stat_done
restart)
$0 stop
$0 start
echo "usage: $0 {start|stop|restart}"
esac
exit 0
what do you think?