[plug] Slightly OT.. Gentoo users?

[Craig Ringer]

> Just got the "end-of-life" email from RedHat for 7.1-8.  I manage one
> RH7.0 machine, how I would love to gentoo it as its stuck with a
> propriety package tied to mac addresses and RH7.0 libs.  So far I have
> been downloading later patched source rpm's and building them and the
> inevitable dependencies by hand.  Being able to easily and simply build
> just the parts of the system that need it (security) would be so nice...

I have a suggestion for you, then. It should be possible to run RH7 as a 
'chrooted' environment under a modern kernel - some admin tools won't 
work, etc, but it should be otherwise fine. I would simply pack up the 
entire system as a cpio archive, then unpack it on my new host under 
(say) /legacy-app-name . Simply

'chroot /legacy-app-name /etc/rc.d/rc.chroot'

(where rc.setup is a script that does any further setup needed for the 
environment)

and you /should/ be OK. It's worth a test, to be sure. If, say, it turns 
out that even RH7 user-space won't work under 2.6 and you need to move 
to 2.6 on that system, you may be able to run RH7 under UML ;-)

As for the MAC address lock: If it's not actually to lock to a 
particular NIC but rather a general run-prevention feature, it should be 
easy to bypass. Simply:

# modprobe dummy
# ifconfig dummy0 hw ether 00:A0:11:11:11:11 192.168.5.1
# nameif eth1 00:A0:11:11:11:11

Yeah, I also renamed it eth1 using the MAC address I just gave it ;-)

Hope this is useful.

Craig Ringer