problems compiling AS2.1 kernels for enterprise evaluation

[Max Pakhutkin]

Greetings,

I'm compiling Advanced server 2.1 sources in an effort to create an 
AS2.1 pilot installation so that management could evaluate it with the 
possibility of later buying one of the support licenses from RedHat.

So far I've compiled sources on a RH7.2, created the installation CD's 
and installed from CD, using the earliest available kernel package 
(2.4.9-e.9). The installation went fine and I'm not having any problems 
with the resulting system so far.

Now I'm compiling the sources again (this time on my initial install of 
AS2.1 build) to make sure the result is as close to what would come in 
an official AS2.1 distribution as possible. Naturally, I'm interested in 
including the most recent kernel in the resulting CD set. However, none 
of the kernel-2.4.18-* source RPMS from the updates compile. Each of 
them includes at least half a dozen patches that seem to want to patch 
files that don't exist in the sources. After removing references to the 
problem patches from the spec file and recompiling, either the make 
config stage complains about there not being defaults for some of the 
configuration settings (easily fixed), or the "make" stage can't find a 
target to make something. And since I'm not a kernel hacker, I'm not 
sure how to fix that.

I'd really like to be able to evaluate the most recent kernels for AS 
since they seem to include a lot of useful patches (especially the 
Oracle-related ones and the new driver modules), otherwise we might as 
well go with RH7.3 for deployment. So if anyone can point me in the 
right direction for compiling the most recent kernel packages, I'd 
greatly appreciate it.

My system is an i686 one, I use rpmbuild --rebuild kerne*.src.rpm 
command, or rpmbuild -ba /pathtospecfile command. I'm compiling as a 
non-root user with %top_dir set properly. Every single applicable AS2.1 
package that I compiled on 7.2 (about 1200 of them in total) is installed.

Thanks in advanced.

Max Pakhutkin