I am trying to deal with a problem on a server I don't normally deal with. Out of the blue a script using ppp started failing saying that the ppp kernel module is not loaded. When I try to modprobe it it complains about files missing. Note below that the kernel version the server thinks it at, does not match the kernel version directory in /lib/modules.
I'm not sure how this could have happened. Could the other maintainers of the server botched a kernel upgrade?
My question is how can I fix this discrepancy. Can I simply rename the lib directory and hope for the best? I don't want to break stuff for the people who actually maintain the server but I do need to fix the PPP issue.
$ sudo /sbin/modprobe -v ppp
FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.35.4-rscloud/modules.dep: No such file or directory
$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.35.4-rscloud (root@builder.slicehost.com) (gcc version 4.4.3 (Ubuntu 4.4.3-4ubuntu5) ) #8 SMP Mon Sep 20 15:54:33 UTC 2010
$ ls /lib/modules/
2.6.33.5-rscloud
Best Answer
First thing to try would be to obtain the modules for the running kernel from those other guys. Also, it might to find out what the versions of the already loaded modules are. Maybe this is a VM? (Xen? OpenVZ?) Then it might have been supplied a kernel + initrd from the host which would explain how it even came up with a incompletely installed kernel.
And you can feel lucky and try to use insmod (doesn't do dependencies) on the ppp module from the older kernel version.