[plug] Slightly OT.. Gentoo users?

[Craig Ringer]

I just read over this again, and it's gibberish. Sorry. Senile-post,
I know, but this should clarify things:

------

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 in the 
child environment 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 . You may simply be able 
to chroot into this and run the app with no further work. It's also 
possible, though, that the app needs extra things run. If so, you may be 
able to run a script under the chrooted environment that runs whatever
helpers etc the app needs. For example:

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

(where rc.setup is a custom script that does any further setup needed 
for the environment. It may steal bits out of rc.sysinit and rc.local, 
but you need to be aware that you're sharing the same network 
interfaces, port numbers, etc as the parent OS.)

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 your current kernel, 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 ;-)

Alternately, if the app does actually need to talk using a particular 
ethernet interface with a particular MAC address, there are NICs around 
that allow their MAC address to be changed in software. You might want 
to find one.

BTW, I loath hardware locks, dongles, MAC address locking, etc. They're 
pointless, and all they really achive is (a) making the competitor's 
product look more attractive, (b) wasting your time and effort and (c) 
totally f**ing you over when you need to get back up and runnning after 
a hardware failure, robbery, etc.

Hope this is useful.

Craig Ringer

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