modprobe problems, can't load unix.o, others

[Andrew Sweger]

I've been getting the following message on the client:

syslogd: cannot create /tmp/etc/syslogsocket: Address family not supported
by protocol

I've been using the stock DHCP1 kernel from fai-kernels (1.2). This
message appears after "Calling task_confdir". unix.o is in
/lib/modules/2.2.20/misc of the nfsroot.

I've found three ways to "fix" this, but I don't know if any of them are
the correct way for dealing with this.

1) I built a custom 2.2.20 kernel (starting with the fai-kernels build)
with CONFIG_UNIX=y. This works because the unix.o module is compiled right
into the kernel. I don't think this is a good solution.

2) I put 'insmod unix' before the call to syslogd in subroutines-linux.
This works because it manually tells the kernel to load the unix.o
module. That's a kluge for sure.

3) Remove 'alias net-pf-1 off' from /usr/share/fai/etc/fai_modules_off and
running make-fai-nfsroot. I don't know why this works. I do know that
net-pf-1 is the Unix domain socket driver. The comment at the top of
fai_modules_off seems to imply the purpose of this file is to silence
modprobe complaints. But it seems to be preventing the modules from being
loaded at all.

I'm a bit fuzzy on the magic of autoloading kernel modules still, which
may be why I'm confused by this. In addition to the problem above, I'm
getting modprobe complaints which seem to be coming from the
netdevice_info function:

modprobe: modprobe: Can't locatemodule eth1
modprobe: modprobe: Can't locatemodule eth2
modprobe: modprobe: Can't locatemodule eth3
...and so on through 8

Is there a missing module configuration probably causing this?

-- 
Andrew B. Sweger -- The great thing about multitasking is that several
                                things can go wrong at once.