Woops

Ok, I didn't experience any DIRECT trouble concerning the "NULL pointer dereference"-issue. But.., I DID experience trouble upgrading my running kernel to the newly "NULL pointer"-patched one though.

Thing is, I didn't pay much attention to which type of kernel the old one got replaced with. Patrick Volkerding (BDFL @ Slackware) announced on the Slackware security-list that slackers would have to re-generate the ramdisk image for the new "generic SMP" kernel before re-installing bootup.

...which of course, I failed utterly to do...

And by doing a remote reboot, I did not catch the "VFS kernel panic" message that popped up at boot-time.

The ramdisk image contains the (un)loadable driver-modules for the linux-kernel, which includes the ext3 filesystem and it's debugging facilities.

This then led to the kernel stopping at the multiuser runlevel, and locking itself into a panic...

Seems I'll be doing some tinkering and modification when I get home from work today...

Update, wednesday august 26th:

No such luck. Not only could I not find my rescue live-cd, I could not even find my Slackware install-DVD. Better fire up the ol' burner and make a few copies today. These are the incidents where I consider myself lucky not having to hold service-agreements and stuff related to production-servers :P *Phew*

Update, thursday august 27th:

B/c of lack of proper and decent concentration, I have failed miserably to ressurect my webserver once again. Now my downtime is nearing a 7-day period, which I have not had for over a year. I blame my PlayStation3 system, damn you excitingly-fun super-entertaining every-device-I'll-ever-need-rolled-into-one-wonderfantastic-awesome box! Yes, I *heart* my PS3 :P