I just spent more time than I care to think about compiling a staticly-linked kernel for the one Linux server I manage. It's a server that does one and only one thing, so I can afford to crank it down pretty hard. This step should make root-kitting it a little harder.
But it took a l-o-n-g time to compile a kernel that'd work. I thought I could get away with getting a dynamic kernel that showed no modules in 'lsmod', and then flinking the 'use modules' switch. But that just changed everything listed as "m" to "y" in the .config file, and that, as you might expect, didn't work out so good. I ended up with a kernel that was about 4.5megs, and it complained, "Kernel is too big, consider using modules or bzImage". And since modules was out of the question and I was already using bzImage, I had to see what I could whack out.
Round two worked better, but took a lot of tweaking. I took the config file that worked for the modules-none-loaded build, and did a find and replace on "=m" with "=n", then set it to not use loadable modules. It wouldn't compile, since there were dependancies in crypto and a few other areas.
About 15 compiles later I now have a kernel that works. The big problem I had to figure out was why eth0 kept giving me a SIDIOINUSE or something like that. Turned out that a touchpad driver was attempting to load on the IRQ for eth0. Removed the touchpad driver from the .config, and now I have both ethernet cards working. Yay!
Still took too long.
But it took a l-o-n-g time to compile a kernel that'd work. I thought I could get away with getting a dynamic kernel that showed no modules in 'lsmod', and then flinking the 'use modules' switch. But that just changed everything listed as "m" to "y" in the .config file, and that, as you might expect, didn't work out so good. I ended up with a kernel that was about 4.5megs, and it complained, "Kernel is too big, consider using modules or bzImage". And since modules was out of the question and I was already using bzImage, I had to see what I could whack out.
Round two worked better, but took a lot of tweaking. I took the config file that worked for the modules-none-loaded build, and did a find and replace on "=m" with "=n", then set it to not use loadable modules. It wouldn't compile, since there were dependancies in crypto and a few other areas.
About 15 compiles later I now have a kernel that works. The big problem I had to figure out was why eth0 kept giving me a SIDIOINUSE or something like that. Turned out that a touchpad driver was attempting to load on the IRQ for eth0. Removed the touchpad driver from the .config, and now I have both ethernet cards working. Yay!
Still took too long.