DHCP hostname not properly populated with readonly rootfs

General Discussions
1

Hi,

I have RPI3 board with mender integrated and using readonly rootfs. For networking I’m using systemd-networkd. I have symlinked /etc.hostname to /data/etc/hostname. My issue is that after board get dhcp from server it will report in list of connected devices hostname raspberrypi and not hostname set per board. Issue is that /data partition is mounted late and in this case systemd use default hostname and hostname update doesn’t affect one in lease. Asked on support in systemd folks but response was to mount /data in initrd to be present in early systemd stages and it should work (response from systemd creator):

Two issues: /etc/hostname is read very early during boot, before PID 1
starts the first other userspace program. This means you'd have to
mount that fs from the initrd already, to be applied.

hostnamed and friends live in a sandbox these days, that prohibit
write access outside of /etc, and read access to various other
dirs. If you play such symlink games, you have to turn that off. See
the systemd-hostnamed.service service file, specifically
ProtectSystem= and similar options.

That all said, instead of introducing /data and keeping the whole of
the OS read-only, I'd recommend to instead operate with a read-only
/usr only, combined with a writable / that comes up in the initrd
already and is automatically populated on first boot. i.e. keep /etc
and everything else as empty as possible, and store only the stuff in
it actually needed. systemd itself is all set up for this mode, and is
happy if there's no configuration in /etc around. Some distros are not
that happy with such a set up however, they require some bits in /etc
existing. Ideally distros would be fixed to not require that and be
happy with /etc entirely empty, but until then you can use
tmpfiles.d/'s "C" lines copy in basic necessary configuration into
/etc from /usr/share/factory/.

Lennart

Just want to ask if anyone doing it similar way or have some other ideas how to solve this issue. Thanks a lot.

2

In one case we replaced the /sbin/init process with something like this to ensure that /data is mounted before systemd runs,

#!/bin/sh
echo "----- Init script enter. Mounting /data -----" | tee /dev/kmsg

#Mount devices that need to be present for systemd to run below. Otherwise let systemd mount them
mount /dev/mmcblk0p4 /data

#Run systemd
exec /lib/systemd/systemd "$@"
3

@mirzak thanks a lot