+++ Chris Jones [2011-09-10 14:17 +0100]:
> While building from the 1.0-stable branch today, which still ought
> to be supported because it's what's advertised on the
> balloonboard.org website, I ran into a problem.
> 
> The build process tries very hard to download 'netkit' from
> ftp.uk.linux.org. That site doesn't seem to work any more, so the
> build process gives up. Fortunately I had a copy of the relevant
> file lying around, so could work around this.

The build and release process used to take a copy of every file it
downloaded and store them at balloonboard.org, and builds should try
downloading from there before falling back to upstream sources, to
avoid exactly this long-term support issue.

I don't know if that was actually still true by release 1.0-stable (or
more to the point whether anyone uploaded the full set of stuff). 

It should be here:
http://www.balloonboard.org/files/balloon3/distro/rel-v1.0/sources
and there is this:
http://www.balloonboard.org/files/balloon3/distro/rel-v1.0/sources/initrd/netkit-base-0.17.tar.gz

If the build isn't trying to download it from there then something
needs poking.

> I couldn't quickly find an alternative source of the same file.
> What's it for? Something to do with the initrd root filesystem, I
> think.

Ping, ifconfig, route in the initrd.

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
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