* * * * *

                 “Oh, so <em>that's</em> what I did wrong … ”

I spent Labor Day with John the paper millionaire of a dotcom. He wanted to
work some more on the reverse engineering [1] project we started yesturday.

Today's goal was installing the IPX drivers on his Linux box, which turned
into a long and arduous venture.

Normally, I don't run modular Linux kernels—aside from the security issues
they bring up—they're not the most elegant thing under Linux (heck, if it
wasn't in Unix V6 it's a horrible kludge that doesn't integrate well in Unix,
such as threads, file locking, removable media and installable drivers at
either boot or runtime but I digress … ) and a bit of a pain to use.

I initially tried:

-----[ shell ]-----
# cd /lib/modules/2.2.14-0.5smp/misc
# insmod ipx.o
-----[ END OF LINE ]-----

but that didn't work. Too many errors. So we then spent the next few hours
trying to recompile the Linux kernel to support IPX and none of the kernels
would boot (they all failed trying to mount the root filesystem from the SCSI
(Small Computer System Interface) drive).

By this time Mark [2] arrived and after mucking about for another hour,
tried:

-----[ shell ]-----
# insmod ipx
-----[ END OF LINE ]-----

That worked.

insmod ipx.o didn't, yet insmod ipx did. I've done the insmod module.o and
it's worked when I've done it (okay, mostly under a 2.0 kernel) yet
apparently there is magic done when you don't specify the .o extension.

And Linux zealots wonder why Windows is so popular …

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2000/09/03.2
[2] http://www.conman.org/people/myg/

Email author at [email protected]

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