Messages in this thread | | | From | "Peter T. Breuer" <> | Subject | Re: Building .config into the kernel | Date | Thu, 14 Jan 1999 20:55:54 +0100 (MET) |
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"A week of mondays ago Alan Cox wrote:" > > > with an uptime of 120 days, and the admin you're helping doesn't know > > which kernel he booted.. It's also not available at boot time, which is > > If the admin doesnt know which kernel he booted, he hasn't got symbol tables > or .config data. In those cases I wouldnt even bother debugging it much
It's often a hard fight to find which server booted what kernel from where and whether it still has it even for a _good_ admin. There isn't room for more than one or two good admins per institute. The rest will be helpless. The good ones may not be physically present, or the machine may be only accessible in limited ways (I often lose all contact except for the nfs mount of their /etc's on my machines, for example, when A.Useless wrecks nis, misconfigures dns by wrapping a comment line, or other miserable miscreant thing, but the mount leaves me just enough leeway to be able to get in and fix things).
It's ridiculous not to waste 4k of space on a list of config options in memory on 256MB servers holding up 30 client machines. It saves time and avoids confusion. It helps bug reporting too .. telephone conversation: "is your kernel configured for firewalling? .. I don't know! .. please zcat /proc/config.gz | mail me@here please .."
uh .. flame off. Not that it was very hot.
Peter
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