I installed Redhat 7.2 yesterday. Because I felt my system needed a little rejuvenation, I decided to do a fresh install.
I tried to make sure I had a backup of all my important files and, generally, I think that went OK and I now have many gigabytes of free space that was previously taken up by things I'd installed and never used. Anyway, to my question ... I decided to choose for the install not to set up a firewall, because I had an iptables script that I'm happy with and was planning on using that. However, it would appear that iptables support isn't included in the kernel that was installed by RH 7.2 (2.4.7). That may simply be because I asked for no firewall, but I don't know. If that's the case, I think it's kind of poor that they would leave out such support, given that one might easily decide to add firewalling later, but I guess that's a design decision on their part. Anywa, I tried booting the 2.4.13 image I had been using previously, but hit a problems because it didn't support ext3, which I'd chosen when I installed the RH 7.2 system ... that was another reason I decided to go with a new install. So, I've downloaded 2.4.16 and am currently building that, after having made sure it's including modules for both ext3 and iptables. Once I finish the "make modules", I'm going to have to do a "make install modules" ... I believe? What I'm worried about is whether if the new kernel fails, I'll end up not being able to boot the 2.4.7 kernel that came with RH 7.2, since I assume the "make install modules" will scribble over its modules. Do I need to worry about that, or do modules get installed somewhere based on the kernel you've built? Also, RH 7.2 uses GRUB and it refers to an initrd file that has a kernel version number in it. How do I make an equivalent for my new kernel ... or can I safely use the one that the 2.4.7 kernel is using? Any other issues I should worry about? If someone can point me to a URL where I can find a detailed explanation of these sorts of things, that would be great. TIA -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
