Recently I became active again on our local packet network when a netrom routing issues was reported and I was asked to help with it. I had designed part of the network a good 10 year prior, so I had a good idea of how it should be working.
I had not been active on packet for a variety of reason, mostly around being busy running my own business. So I didn’t have a computer setup to connect.
So I was rather surprised after installing OpenSuse LEAP 15.1 on a spare box I had laying around to find that AX.25 and kissattach wasn’t working. It kept telling me the mkiss kernel module wasn’t present. That seemed odd to me, they always had complied it in the Default kernel….. But how the times change. They dropped at some point along with many of the other older network drivers.
So, what is an old Linux dog to do…well compile a customer kernel of course. Now keep in mind the last time I compiled a kernel was back on kernel Version 2.16 so it’s been a few years.
I referenced this blog from the openSuse site as a reference.
It wasn’t too different than what I remembered.
So, here is the RPM that I built which has AX.25 support as modules, as well and XEN/KVM support for virtualization.