The Site With the Lamp

October 1, 2006

I need to have ReiserFs support in my (Annoying) Centos server. Sadly, the Centos Plus kernel doesn't support Reiser as it is. As I learnt the hard way, It's not safe to attempt to replace the kernel without physical access to the server (The server is in California I am in Sri Lanka), the only way is to compile reiserfs as a module.

When you do a make menuconfig followed by a make, this is what you get:

UPD     include/asm-i386/asm_offsets.h
mv: cannot stat `include/asm-i386/asm_offsets.h.tmp': No such file or directory
make: *** [include/asm-i386/asm_offsets.h] Error 1

This is the reason that I tried to use CentosPlus kernel in the first place. Will be able to get over this if I did a make clean and make mrproper and did a clean start?

CLEAN   .tmp_versions
scripts/Makefile.clean:10: Documentation/DocBook/Makefile: No such file or directory
make[1]: *** No rule to make target `Documentation/DocBook/Makefile'.  Stop.
make: *** [_mrproper_Documentation/DocBook] Error 2

The world is full of pundits and there were loads of useless advice literring the message boards from these pundits. Fortunately I came across some advice by a real geek in this thread at linux questions

Apparently I have to do a rebuild of the source rpm as follows rpmbuild -bp --target $(arch) kernel-2.6.spec and then I need to change into the /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/kernel-2.6.9/linux-2.6.9/ directory. How they came up with such an obsecure place is beyond me, but the compilation was largely successfull afterwards.