Most users are accustomed to the “other sftware” having a forced Read-Only file system by default. While this can be useful, it’s unnecessary in WPSD and in fact, is a pain in the ass sometimes.

WPSD’s filesystem is not read-only…

Rationale for enabling a persistent Read-Write file-system

The dashboard and underlying software only writes significant data to log files, which are used/parsed by the dashboard software to display meaningful data. However, these log files aren’t even written to/read from disk; they are actually stored to memory using tempfs .

Other than that, there is very little else for write activity, and most of it is also written to memory, vs. disk (see ASCII figure below).

And when a user needs to make configuration changes, setups, etc., the file system in Read-Only mode often creates issues where settings may not be saved properly. A huge pain in the ass!

Frankly, I feel a Read-Only file system in WPSD is a false sense of security, does not do much in prolonging SD card life¹ since most data is in memory, and it honestly introduces needless complexity.

ASCII table of most tempfs-enabled (memory) mountpoints in WPSD

tmpfs                   /run
tmpfs                   /run/lock
tmpfs                   /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs                   /tmp
tmpfs                   /var/log
tmpfs                   /var/lib/sudo
tmpfs                   /var/lib/dhcpcd
tmpfs                   /var/lib/logrotate
tmpfs                   /var/lib/nginx/body
tmpfs                   /var/lib/php/sessions
tmpfs                   /var/lib/samba/private
tmpfs                   /var/lib/vnstat