[plug] IP Chains

[Kenworthy Family]

Not only beginners - what "professional" will set up something and not test
it.  I have seen some prize ones where unix (Solaris & digital unix) systems
have been "fiddled" with by sysadmins installing software/changing settings,
not telling the users and then getting paid for an expensive after hours
callout to fix it after a power outage when it wouldn't boot.  When you look
into it, it soon becomes obvious where the problem came from!  Often its just
a simple mistake that a test boot would have found.

And on modules - I have a bt848 tv card that worked great when the bttv
drivers were compiled into the kernel, but fails to load the tuner module when
set up as "alias char-major-81" in conf.modules.  The rest of the modules load
ok.  I can get it to manually load, load via a post-install in conf.modules
using modprobe (whereupon it does not auto-unload and also stops all the other
(now dependent) bttv modules unloading) or manually edit modules.dep which
works, but gets overwritten on reboot (depmod -a is in one of the rc.d
files).  I suspect I will have to make a change in the source for bttv and
recompile the module to set the dependency - or is there another choice? -
comments please.

BillK


russ wrote:

> Christian wrote:
> >
> > If you run the script which the boot process is also going to run then
> > rebooting does not do anything different. Do you reboot if you change
> > your machine's IP address?  How about if you add a new route?  Do you
> > log out and in again if you add something to your ~/.profile?  If people
> > want to reboot their machines every time they breathe then that's their
> > decision but it seems silly to advocate it to people, particularly
> > someone who is new to Linux from a Windows background.  It would make
> > more sense to point out that a reboot is unnecessary and highlight how
> > Linux is better in this regard.
>
> You don't know what will happen when you reboot until you reboot,
> unless you are a linux boot guru of course.  :)
>
> I would assume that booting is not entirely random sequence, some
> things need to be done before others. I'm not a linux expert and many
> times I've managed to get something running then when I reboot the
> next day it doesn't work any more. And, as someone already said, it's
> a lot easier to pin point the problem when you make the change rather
> than a couple of days later when you find something you thought you
> had fixed doesn't work. You may not remember what you have done (as an
> amateur I do that a lot too :).
>
> It's not a "windoze" thing. It's a reasonable test for possible
> mistakes, especially for a beginner.