Initial RAMdisks in SystemImager

Documentation at IBM indicated that initial RAMdisks used to be created using an actual loop-mounted RAMdisk and gzip. However nowadays they are made using an ordinary directory and cpio, like this: find ./ | cpio -H newc -o > /tmp/new-initrd.cpio. Still it is hard to get systemimager to create a (kernel,initrd) pair that will boot an amd64 Etch box properly. With "BOEL" kernel it fails complaining about insmod.old (which belongs to the 2.4 line of kernels), with UYOK it complains "No init found" (which might be a module problem). To add to this, the systemimager site is down today, and the systemimager people have deemed it necessary to create their source packages without actual source. They just download from the systemimager site, which is down. So we cannot work. Furthermore, the Debian maintainer just dropped the package, so even if the site comes up, we still haven't got and amd64 package. So much for the systemimager. I have my hopes back on Harm.