Geek projects, tidbits and things I'm working on at the moment…

I’m in the process of building up a SAN from scratch using SCST & CentOS. I’ve played around w/ kernels in the past but hadn’t done it in a while. When downloading 2.6.36.2 from Kernel.org recently I couldn’t get a bootable kernel no matter what I did w/ CentOS (and yes, I did load the CentOS .config file into menuconfig before compiling my kernel.)

  Come to find out, because CentOS is using a modified 2.6.18 kernel that little .config file is very out dated. As of kernel 2.6.31 a new kernel parameter is available called “enable deprecated sysfs features to support old userspace tools” which is under the General setup area. Once I enabled that option, I was good to go. It has something to do with why my SAS RAID card wasn’t getting picked up upon boot up. Everything else after that was a piece of cake!

You could have also just added this to your .config file. (NOTE: Hats off to Vanecka!)
CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED_V2=y

Couple Kernel compile links for CentOS 5:

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Custom_Kernel  (official CentOS wiki kernel build page)
http://www.howtoforge.com/kernel_compilation_centos_p2  (HowtoForge article)
http://kerneltrap.org/node/1783 (Old kernel trap article which mentions the use of -j8 for make parameters so you’ll use all of your cores on compiles! I did a ‘make -j8 all’ and finished my kernel compile in under 5 minutes on a Xenon E5620 CPU!)
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/6.4/chapter08/kernel.html (LFS link on kernel compile)

I’ve used both CDs personally countless times and can’t recommend them enough. If you’re just looking to reset your administrator password to blank or need to move data off the system’s hard disk these CDs will help greatly. I’m always forgetting the acronyms so I decided to write them down for once. I typically carry UBCD w/ me at all times.

Couple quick links to the prospective websites…

http://www.prime-expert.com/ebcd/