Friday February 27, 2004

I'd installed RH9 on a box for a specialized use (a reverse proxy server built on mod_perl 2.0). It's basic deployment requirement was simply that it'd sit in the server room on a rack (i.e. headless). Everything went fine on the system installation and the software that I setup thereafter. However, after I racked it and put a little startup script in /etc/rc.d/init.d for the mod_perl instance I'd deployed, I rebooted it in it's "production" mode i.e. without any input devices attached. Lo and behold, it hung with a message about the power management stuff, something like
apm: BIOS version 1.2 Flags 0x03 ...
[it just stops there ]
So I set out to recompile the kernel. Since I don't do these kinds of things regularly anymore, I had to poke around and read through the procedures. Just for posterity's sake, this is what I did:

• cd /usr/src/linux-2.4
• make mrproper
• make menuconfig (de-selected APM and some other unneeded junk like sound support)
• make dep
• make clean
• make bzImage
• make modules
• make modules_install
• make install
• /sbin/mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.4.20-6-noapm.img 2.4.20-6
• cat /boot/grub/grub.conf (checkout the filenames so I know what to use for the next command)
• /sbin/grubby --set-default=/vmlinuz-2.4.20-6custom
• reboot

I used use FreeBSD for everything I possibly could. It's been a few years since I've had to custom build kernels for BSD but I recall the process being super straight forward; the amount of dickering around with different configuration tools was nil -- just edit a kernel config file and go compile that suckah.

I miss that. Unfortunately, all of the work that I do with Java is not compatible with sticking with BSD; my work is tuxified. If fortune shines upon me, my work in the future will be on Mac OS X where: no kernel dickering should ever be needed, it's BSD and it's slick. ( Feb 27 2004, 11:29:15 AM PST ) Permalink