Monday, June 07, 2004

a template for my blog

right then..for too long now i have used the same dumb colors that blogger gives me...
so from now on I will follow this template..all stuff from the net will be in font size 4
and in bold

my comments will be in this color for easy visibility
much better isnt it?

trying some things out


now all this text should be in alice blue color ..is it?

and this should be bold is it?
lets check it out

How linux boots

librenix.com carried a beautiful article about the booting process in linux available at
http://www.pycs.net/lateral/stories/23.html

In the regular, plain-old-booting-linux business, all the boot loader does is:


Load the kernel into memory
Optionally load a ramdisk called initrd containing stuff like disk drivers
Pass the kernel arguments, of which we are only interested in runlevel and init
Start execution of the kernel.



knew that already ...the interesting part starts from here :)
What does the kernel do with init? It starts it. It's the only program the kernel itself starts, everything else is started by init.
remember reading that somewhere


In Red Hat's default inittab, that's just this:

si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

So, it will run a script called /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit, which does stuff like loading a terminal font, check disks, mount stuff... basic system habitability drudge work.

Then it will get all lines with action once and wait that have the desired runlevel in the runlevel field, and will run its commands, and will wait until the wait lines commands are finished.

In Red Hat, for runlevel 5:

l5:5:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 5

What this particular script does is start all services configured for runlevel 5. That's what you see when it says things like "configuring the frobnozz [OK]" on boot. Now, let's see the details...


interesting
For each runlevel N, there is a folder, called /etc/rc.d/rcN.d.

Here's part of my folder for runlevel 5:

K05saslauthd -> ../init.d/saslauthd
K10lircd -> ../init.d/lircd
K10lircmd -> ../init.d/lircmd
K15httpd -> ../init.d/httpd
K15nessusd -> ../init.d/nessusd
:
:
:
S00microcode_ctl -> ../init.d/microcode_ctl
S05kudzu -> ../init.d/kudzu
S08iptables -> ../init.d/iptables
S10network -> ../init.d/network
S12syslog -> ../init.d/syslog
S13irqbalance -> ../init.d/irqbalance
:
:
:

The things that start with K are to be stopped. Those which start with S are to be started. The numbers are to give them an order to be killed or started.

So, we start by taking all the K stuff. For each, we check if the service is running. If it is, it's stopped.

didnt know that !!

good overview of the bootup process..sliglhtly outdated though :)

Sunday, June 06, 2004

god why me?

thoroughly frustrating day today..
we got the interconnect between java and c working fine..finally
thought we might as well check if we are able to transmit video..
and shock and horror..ohphone crashes..not to worry recompiling it should make it work
but no recompiling also didnt help
it still crashes
spent the day from 2 to 8 pm trying to figure out
why ohphone wasnt able to allocate channel to the driver only god knows...:(

a silver lining though was able to finally make up my mind on my fyp
sent a mail to prof vikram asking for the rfid project
lets see how he responds
got to sleep and make that dumb thing work tommorrow
jayaram
jayarams home page

Tuesday, June 01, 2004

another test for the blog plugin

yet another test to see if this time atleast the song shows up at the bottom

[Listening to: AP News Live Audio Feed - - (00:00)]

blogging with winamp

trying to see if at the end of the blog there is an entry about the type of songs i am hearing
lets see if this works
jayaram