usually i just upgrade the kernel, but hey, time for some cleanup!

i save the .config file for the running kernel, as lazy i am, no need to spend more time than necessary.

since i decided to make it my router, i had to compile iptables support. which i did, and compiled rest of the netfilter/iptables related stuff as modules. so the weird thing was, while i were trying out an old iptables rules script

i got an error like

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE

FATAL: Module ip_tables not found.

iptables v1.3.8: can’t initialize iptables table `nat’: Table does not exist (do you need to insmod?)
Perhaps iptables or your kernel needs to be upgraded.

First i reinstalled iptables which made no difference, then the kernel again (included a few useless modules)

and i still got the error.

anyway, it seems like it can be rather unhealthy to use your current kernel config everytime you compile a new kernel, since there are some options which arent updated(no questions asked)

anyway, i did a make menuconfig, removed the support for networking (Networking – [*]Networking Support)

save the config file, opened it again, and enabled the support. all the original settings were removed, and i had to config it from scratch, but to my big surprise, i suddenly had alot more options to play with. and after compiling the kernel, rebooting – the problem was fixed

 At least the client has improved over the years since i last used it, which must have been 7 years ago or something. anyway, my memory isn’t what it used to b…hmm, nevermind. my memory more or less always fails to remember anything at all, so of course i ran into problems again. here’s some output from /var/log/syslog after trying to start pppoe.

 (i actually did compile a new kernel with support for PPP, but i forgot something…)

Oct 26 23:39:16 foo pppd[3069]: pppd 2.4.4 started by root, uid 0
Oct 26 23:39:16 foo pppd[3069]: Serial connection established.
Oct 26 23:39:16 foo pppd[3069]: Couldn’t set tty to PPP discipline: Invalid argument
Oct 26 23:39:16 foo pppoe[3071]: PADS: Service-Name: ”
Oct 26 23:39:16 foo pppoe[3071]: PPP session is 41216 (0xa100)
Oct 26 23:39:16 foo pppoe[3071]: read (asyncReadFromPPP): Session 41216: Input/output error
Oct 26 23:39:16 foo pppoe[3071]: Sent PADT
Oct 26 23:39:46 foo pppd[3069]: Serial connection established.

In short,i forgot to compile support for “PPP support for async serial ports”