LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 16:19:29 +0930

where do you get mkinitrd; and more SuSE 7.1 woe+travail

Does anyone know where to get the mkinitrd program?

So far, I've tried "locate" on a couple of systems,
freshmeat.net, linux documentation project (which has a note
on it being a shell script in the LILO HOWTO) and google.

It seems to be more or less optional is you don't boot off RAID
or SCSI disks. So I've found I don't _really_ need it.
But it's curious that it doesn't seem to be on my SuSE systems.

By the way, here's my little set of notes on how to cope with
SuSE 7.1 from the security point of view.
http://www.topology.org/linux/suse71.html

So far, for even minimal security, I've found I have to replace:
-	the kernel (because ReiserFS is bad etc.)
-	named (BIND), although 9.1. does sort of come with the distribution.
-	iptables (because running an FTP server through iptables
	causes arbitrary holes to open up on the firewall)

I also found that if you use the .config files supplied with SuSE 7.1
for their 2.4.0-4GB kernel, then you get two or three places in the
kernel configuration where the compilation/installation stops,
due to apparent errors in the dependency rules for the kernel.
And there's no mkinitrd script that I can find to make the initrd files.

So all in all, SuSE 7.1 out fo the box is not a goer.
No wonder they offer a separate disk with updates already.
But even that must be out-of-date already, because the
iptables FTP server bug was discovered very recently.

Oh yes, and the Apache source they give you with the distribution
is far too difficult to use. I couldn't work out how to turn it
into a compiled http server with PHP etc. etc.
So I just dumped it and rebuilt everything (PHP, PostgreSQL, Apache)
from source off the net - although the latest PHP does not work with
the latest Apache, but that's another story.....

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

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    name: Dr. Alan Kennington
  e-mail: akenning@topology.org
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    city: Adelaide, South Australia
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