My Debian distro doesn't seem to have the lsmode/modprobe, etc. dynamic module control suite of programs. Is this peculiar to the UML distros on Linux? I discovered this when I tried to use cryptoloop.

No, it is not particular to UML, but it is particular to Linode. The kernels that are provided to you by Linode are statically linked and have no support for loading modules (for security reasons). The feature you need is probably already compiled in.

Basically the issue is that the kernel (and therefore its modules) is a program that runs on the host, instead of on your Linode. For obvious reasons, allowing Linode users to run arbitrary programs on the host server is not a good idea.

But Caker has compiled most everything into the kernels, and he's good about taking suggestions if you want something else put in.

can we have coda? or would that be a security breach?