grsecurity forums

hi,

i patched my 2.4.26 kernel and did the steps as described in
http://www.grsecurity.org/quickstart.pdf ...

after the succesfully building and rebooting (the logs look normal)
i'm not able to connect to the box. no ping nor ssh nor anything else work.

if i boot the old kernel, and take a look on the boot logs, all things look ok... wired heh?!


any ideas?

obsolete wrote:hi,

i patched my 2.4.26 kernel and did the steps as described in
http://www.grsecurity.org/quickstart.pdf ...

after the succesfully building and rebooting (the logs look normal)
i'm not able to connect to the box. no ping nor ssh nor anything else work.

if i boot the old kernel, and take a look on the boot logs, all things look ok... wired heh?!
any ideas?

I doubt that grsec has anything to do with that. Maybe you forgot to compile in network card support? tcp/ip support missing? Maybe a "diff -Naurp old_dmesg new_dmesg" will tell anything important different? Check it out.

ciao, Marc

hi,

i just asked a network admin. he told me that the problem is, after the reboot, the kernel writes some necessary parameters into the MII-EEprom of the network card. but this parameters become not active before a draw of the power plug. and without those "activated" parameters the network card won't work.

wired heh?! i never saw a such strange behaviour before..

-obsolete

it sounds a bit like bs to me tbh, i've had many different network cards in my life, rebooted a lot and tried many kernels (both with and without grsec)
Never had a network card that didn't get back up after a reboot, unless in the case where i did what Marc suggested

No idea whether this is the original poster's problem or not but this does exist; ethernet cards that support wake-on-LAN get a set of parameters 'filled in' the first time they are initialised by the OS and then leave themselves activated after poweroff/reboot (in order to reactivate the machine when it sees a magic packet). Some Linux drivers can't deal with the card being in this state, and so fail to be able to initialise the card when the OS is restarted. My server suffered from this problem until I pulled out the wake-on-LAN cable - it could not talk to the network after a reboot until it was unplugged from the mains and reconnected.

Weird but true, but it may not be the original poster's problem; it's not exactly common. =)

unfortunately it can't be the wol cable, because there is no
so, i hope the box will be running stable the next ten yeats

-obsolete

Modern systems don't need a cable to do wake-on-LAN - it's handled over the bus by the BIOS. My server is just old as the hills. Look in the BIOS for settings? No idea if this is actually the problem, though.