Help! My Linux won't boot.

Pre-kernel

!Loading Linux... Uncompressing the kernel. (stop)

Are you using an InitialRamdisk? (initrd?) If so, do you have CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM and CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD enabled in your kernel?

Kernel loading

Runlevel 2 and beyond

Loading syslog... (5 minute pause)
Loading MTA... (5 minute pause)
Loading apache...failed

Your problem is DNS, or the lack thereof. These services will all want to look up names in their configuration (normally your local machine name) and will be taking a month of sundays to time out as a result. Confirm this by typing 'host mydomain.tla' at the root prompt.

A good solution for this is to make sure that your /etc/hostname file (which is set using hostname(1)) also appears in your /etc/hosts file, like such:

127.0.0.1 full.local.domain.name alias1 alias2

Eg

127.0.0.1 firewall.wiki.tla firewall

(Remember, /etc/hostname should contain the shortened version of the name, 'firewall', not the FQDN.)