After a fresh netinstall of Debian 8 Jessie to a small-ish 10GB ext4 partition, everything seemed to operate normally. We had a speed bump navigating the Debian installer's non-intuitive partitioner interface to delete the existing LVM volumes and group, but nothing unusual occurred during the install.
Since the existing partitions were all deleted, it's hard to say, now, what went wrong before. My working guess is that maybe there's some bad spots on the 1TB hard drive, and this forced the / volume to open in read-only mode. As I noted before, "su root"
should have worked.
If the "bad spots on the hard drive" theory is correct, then it's entirely possible for this problem to crop up when trying to utilize space on the rest of the drive. That said, 10GB is plenty of space for a time server, with XFCE4 desktop suite (it would comfortably fit in half of that).
You can boot to a LiveCD or USB thumbdrive install, to run "gparted", to expand the size of the ext4 partition, but honestly I don't really see a compelling reason to do so. Depending on what you might want to utilize the nearly 1TB of free space available for, I might just create a second ext4 partition for data. Maybe to store video footage of events?
If you want to harden the machine to the desert environment, then I'd consider ditching the hard drive altogether. If you have a spare 4GB+ USB thumbdrive lying around, then I'd consider using it combine with my "RAMboot" how-to in order to run the thing purely in RAM. The USB thumbdrive is used only for storing the boot partition and a big tarball of the OS volume. Upon boot, this gets unpacked into a tmpfs ramdrive, and the boot process continues off of that ramdrive. (The USB drive is, from then on, no longer accessed and can be removed.)
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-jessie-37165/
I wouldn't recommend a traditional install on a USB thumbdrive because my experience is that they are more prone to failure than a hard drive install (although spinning hard drives do tend to not like the heat...you'd be the expert on that). But if the USB drive is only accessed upon boot, it's not so bad. And you can always clone a USB thumbdrive to use in case one fails. It's a lot less effort to simply unplug a bad one and plug in a backup than doing the same with internal hard drives.
Still...prototype a working time server solution with the hard drive first. Then look at converting it to RAMboot, maybe.
