Modules vs. in-kernel?

Moriah · Posted: Sun Nov 28, 2004 3:11 am Post subject: times are rought lateley

Sometimes you have already been in the boardroom pointing the finger at Donald and saying you need the budget for that redundancy, and he says, "What are the chances". So you tell him, and he says, "We'll take our chances."

Times are tough, and budgets are tight. Spare parts on the shelf look like wasted money to non-techies. They think these things gradually go bad and we can order new ones before the old ones quit altogether. This may sometimes be true (if you are lucky) with a disk drive, and critical systems use RAID anyway, giving you some security, but other parts can be unique to a given system, because of its function or its age. You can't spare everything. If I could, I would have only 2 or 3 standard configurations to support, but reality says you need a machine and you go scrounge up whatever you can find thats lying around not doing anything. Then you have to install and configure it. It all takes time.

I had the motherboard IDE controller go flakey Thanksgiving Day on the gateway firewall machine. *GROAN*! I had to grab a very old machine and configure it to do firewall duty. It is up now, but Thanksgiving got hectic at around 2 PM here. :-(

Can you say COLD TURKEY? :evil:

And to make matters worse, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, MCI lost the feed line for 8 hours, so we were offline most of Wednesday too.

Bob P · Advocate Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 3374 Location: USA

it must really suck for MIS to be critically undercapitalized in an era when PC parts are so cheap.

for pete's sake -- i'm a homeowner and i have enough spare parts on hand to build an extra scsi based server.

using your example of a mission critical PC that's needed to serve the business's web based clients, if the guys in the boardroom are too cheap to buy a spare controller card for a PC, and their order system crashes, the company deserves to go banrkupt because of shitty management. its just too bad that you can't fire those assholes when you're right and they're wrong. :wink:

carvell · n00b Joined: 28 Nov 2004 Posts: 1

Moriah · Posted: Sun Nov 28, 2004 6:21 pm Post subject: We'll take our chances

Earlier in this thread I said:

thecrazyperson_ws · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 06 Apr 2004 Posts: 89

I take a philosophy that quite possibly many others here take. if it's needed to boot the machine, compile it in, and if it's not, then make it a module then add it to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6. that way, if say, I have a network controller die, at least the machine will still boot so I can add the module for the other network card (assuming it's something other than the 8139too-based card i have now). following this philosophy has led me to a 1.8 meg base kernel which loads no more than another 300 K of modules at startup.
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Bob P · Advocate Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 3374 Location: USA

Codo · Apprentice Joined: 17 May 2004 Posts: 271

I apologize for my ignorance here... What about memory? In what area of memory modules are loaded? I suppose if it is compiled in the kernel the kernel starts to get big...?