I'm trying to use a Chromebox as a tiny server. I'm using Linux through Crostini to host the server application. It really seemed like a good idea. Currently, I'm trying not to replace the whole Chrome OS, although it might come to that.
I think I'm almost done, but my server software requires its storage allocation, a fairly large chunk of data that I store on external drives, to run code. Basically, I need external partitions to be mounted with the exec permission. I would like to point out that I am in developer mode. I've seen some articles on the web that said that mounting an external drive with the exec permission may only be possible in developer mode. But they never explained how. (Of course.) So far, I've tried sudo mount -o remount,exec /the/mount/location from the Chrome OS shell (not the inner Linux shell) and it did not affect the exec permission at all.
Do I need to install a Linux distribution over Chrome OS, or is there a way to mount the external drive with the exec permission within Chrome OS? Or is there yet another solution? The server app needs to be able to execute some files within its storage section and that section is too large to store within the Chromebox's built-in drive. I've been running this server on a Raspberry Pi, but what I really need is a computer with GPU acceleration, which the Chromebox has.
EDIT: Since I posted this, I had the clever idea of finding out which part of the large chunk of data really needed to be executable and I made a soft link to my main drive at that point. Which should have been a win-win: only that small-ish part that needs to be executable needs to be on the main drive. But that didn't work. It seems that Chrome OS does not allow symbolic links from an external mount to the main mount, I assume for that reason. It throws the error Too many levels of symbolic links even though it's the only symbolic link in the path. (I checked.)
