Well, I managed to get the file server mostly configured last night, and had it rebooted successfully before 1:00am. Sure, there were a couple hitches in the grub configuration where I wasn’t exactly sure on the location of the initrd files at boot, and some silly entry errors I made in the grub.conf.

Interesting, and undocumented trivia item #1:

The kernel line must appear before the initrd line. In retrospect, this makes perfect sense to me as I have been using linux variants that booted from floppy; having physical boot and root disks.

IAUT item #2:

The mixture of device naming conventions thrills me in ways I just can’t put words to. At one point, it’s (hd0,0) which is the OS agnostic grub way (physical disk, partition) and then we’re passing the Linux friendly device /dev/hda2. This makes perfect sense after a night’s sleep, but at 1:00am this was a difficult concept to grasp. Got it after a bit of trial and error, though I’m still getting an odd fsck error on boot, but it does boot.

IAUT item #3:

It’s a lot easier to deal with user errors like those caused by my sleepy brain, so long as you’re using grub. I was able to edit the config during the boot process, and try again and again until it worked. Brute force Boot. Try that with lilo.


title GNU/Linux
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.10-gentoo-r6 root=/dev/hda2
initrd /initrd-2.6.10-gentoo-r6