Why not edit the php script to do a loop for this?

Regarding the cause, if you have a tool like htop, or atop you can find out which process is writing to disk a lot.

that's probably true.

The vm still worked because most system utilities are written in a language like C. For which there are system calls available which can be used. The only things that would really break are shell scripts that call /bin/rm. And the days of init managers written in shell are long gone ;).

In Gentoo you don't really have to do it yourself. Portage (the package handler) is basically a system of scripts taking care of that. So instead of fetching a binary package, it fetches sources and knows how to compile them for you. You don't need to know the internals of compiling, but you do need to understand the command line, environment and that kind of stuff.

This specific command no, but the question is not about the issued command. Its about IP addresses. One can also set them manually in Windows.

This is not a Linux or Unix specific question. Think it fits better on super user.

Can you post your busybox .config on a pastebin?

If it's plain BusyBox, how is it you have udev? BusyBox uses mdev.

@mikeserv, it is correct. I am running Gentoo linux for years now without initramfs.