Patrick's Rants

It’s been four days since I decided to bring my Slackware firewall box completely up to date. It was running a 2.4.x Linux kernel and I really wanted to get it running a current 2.6.x kernel. All of my other Slack boxes around here have the 2.6.x kernel and are working decently (not perfectly, one of the laptops has some funkiness with X and one of the kid’s computers isn’t running X at all right now – I kind of chalked that up to X) Installing and running Slackware is not beyond me, I’ve done it numerous times. This time all I found was failure.

It all started Thursday afternoon. I modified my swaret.conf file and changed the version to 12.0, ran swaret –purge all (which cleans all the cache files, downloaded packages, etc.) swaret –update and then swaret –list -u (which lists all the files that need to be updated). At this point it was supposed to be ready to go. I decided to upgrade the kernel from the 12.0 CD that I have on hand. Upgrading the kernel from a 2.4.x series to 2.6.x means that I will be forced to upgrade all the other files so start with the kernel. I was able to install the latest kernel off the CD, picking the “generic” kernel, since the smp kernels won’t work with anything lower than the 686 series (based upon what I’ve read).
Interestingly enough, what I recall through the haze of the last several days is that I was able to upgrade the kernel at first. I was not, however, able to get Slackware to recognize my identical network cards. Previously the modules had to be loaded as “aliases”. Now, Slackware was only finding one network card – kind of useless for a firewall machine.
The upgrade went from bad to worse as eventually I was unable to properly boot, Slack no longer was able to see the file system. (and it dawns on me, writing this, that there was a file system change to ext3 that was required…. dang it)
The generic kernel is supposed to need the file system drivers loaded through the initrd(initial ramdisk – in case any non-geeks got this far) system.
I installed everything that the README.intrd file told me I needed(I thought). I upgraded library files, and ran mkinitrd. I tried to set the NICs as aliases (I think that the network devices needed to be setup in udev)
I ran a new install over the top of the existing Slackware install and still no dice.

I finally grabbed a CD that had been sitting quietly in the software drawer, inserted it into the CD tray and dared to try NetBSD. It’s not what I’m familiar with – but the NICs were both recognized without futzing with it. The harder part was getting firewalling and NAT working since NetBSD uses a different structure. Interestingly, there were a number of options for installation including FTP from the NetBSD site and I was able to install the current version, 4.0, using the 2.0 installation discs by simply changing the directory that was selected on the server. And it’s a small install – taking up only about 300mb total. My biggest gripe is that it doesn’t use bash by default – again a configuration that I’ll eventually learn. Had I been planning on changing the firewall I might have downloaded a full-blown firewall distribution such as: m0n0wall (6MB) Smooth wall (69MB) or one of the many others. In the meantime, I’m learning NetBSD.