Thanks for your help and the replies. So this issue is now resolved. Summary of Issue: Mounting root as read-only as documented in (https://wiki.debian.org/ReadonlyRoot) because rootfs is busy.
Summary of Solution: 1. 'lsof +L1' showed cupsd getting stuck on /etc/passwd (deleted). Looking at systemd journalctl, a custom service on this server was creating users blindly on every startup due to a bug in the code logic of this custom user management application. This caused /etc/passwd to keep changing. By fixing the bug, the /etc/passwd (deleted) was no longer an issue. 2. After reading the debian wiki on ReadOnlyRoot, there is a section on samba creating a file /etc/samba/dhcp.conf everytime dhclient was called. This server has a dual ethernet port with one port not plugged. As a result, dhclient kept trying to get a lease for this eth1 port and thus samba kept creating that file in /etc and rootfs was always busy. Not sure how this issue was solved but by adding the following line to /etc/fstab, I don't see the repeated dhclient messages anymore: tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nodev,nosuid 0 0 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/loom.20140307t202848-...@post.gmane.org