Did some more beating-of-the-head with my gateway machine last night. For whatever reason the default kernel image would fail to load (it would uncompress, say it was booting, and then just hang there without ever going into the usual bootup sequences). However, my backup kernels worked just fine. Figured the boot sector may have gotten corrupted some how, so i reran lilo. Same problem.
So, I rebuild a new kernel, thinking perhaps it was the kernel image itself that was the problem. After all, I discovered, it was exhibiting the same symptoms regardless of whether it was the default boot image or not. 2.4.0-test5 had been working flawlessly on this machine for over a week, and then all of a sudden it died a quick, painless death after a single reboot. Sigh again.
So, I wound up replacing the hard drive late last night and installing RedHat 7.0 on the darn thing. Things now work like they're supposed to, even with -test5 again, so I suspect it was the old 600mb seagate harddrive I'd been using.
On the plus side, it means I have more space to play with and thus have a system that's less a "well, what can I fit into 600mb of disk" exercise. Seeing 128mb of that 600 total get eaten by swap was less than helpful for determining what packages to install. :)
Iptables continues to impress me with the sheer raw power you have over your packets. I've been playing around with some of the kernel patches included in the patch-o-matic CVS stuff, and if/when they get finished up and included, things will be even nicer than they already are. I need to look up the way the various state flags like "RELATED" actually work with the different protocols, but that's one of the last things left for me to grok in the incredibly complex rules dancer sent me. The other thing left to examine is the tcp-flag checking rules, but that's mostly just working out the logic behind them.
I'm also getting tired of dealing with the assorted oddities of my BP6 motherboard. ABIT just announced their VP6, which is a second-gen BP6-style mobo that's FC-PPGA compatible, so I may go with that. I just plain dislike random segfaults in things that shouldn't segfault. Even a single non-overclocked CPU, it has issues. Sigh.
[ "This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time." ]