Why I hate RedHat

 10:54:15 up 8 days, 14:27,  7 users,  load average: 43.78, 80.65, 50.10

I needed to build a kernel package for an old RedHat system. Since there was no chance I'd install a RedHat on my box (let alone an old one), I set up a RedHat chroot environment, and built it in there. Suddenly the connection dropped.

It took me a while to find out what went wrong, but once I saw the load, it was easy. RedHat will parallellize the build if it's running on a multi-CPU system. In itself, that's a good idea; however, when you're running in a chroot (and are to lazy to mount /proc -- hey, it's just for a kernel) the thing that checks the number of processors will come up with nothing, which will end you up building with make -j instead of make -j1. Which hurts. Kinda.