Sles11 on BAFM

Loooong time

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 08:42:36 +0000

It’s been very quiet around here, I’ve been rather busy with my real life. During that busy time, a lot of things happened. I switched jobs starting on October 1st, I’m now working in Karlsruhe (as compared to the 870km northern Greifswald). It may sound far, but it’s actually quite pleasant. You know, I was born down here (well not exactly here – 70 kilometers afar) and I still had the feeling that this is my home.

SLES11 and AutoYaST

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 08:41:46 +0000

After the first week passed awfully quick, the last week I worked on refining the way on how we are doing openSuSE / SUSE Linux Enterprise Server installations. Up till now, they were done by hand (without a predefined schema) and were getting ugly to maintain. Working my way through the Novell documentation on AutoYaST was pretty straight forward, but the little details were getting hairy. So I decided to write them down, in case someone was gonna end up in the same situation like me.

Enabling multipathing in autoyast installations

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 08:30:46 +0000

As I mentioned before, we’re starting to utilize Boot-from-SAN as a means to strip the blades of their local disk. As the title says, after trying a manual installation of SLES 11.1 via CD/HTTP I wanted to automate the process, in order to get a reproducible, consistent installation method. As you might have figured, AutoYaST doesn’t have any built in support for configuring multipathing (hey, that’s what Novell says here). Now, they also provide a comprehensive how-to on how to “add” this to your AutoYaST, using a DUD (or D river U pdate D isk).

SMT: Disable unmirrorable catalogs

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:22:50 +0000

Today I got this report from my SMT:

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WARNING: The following repositories cannot be mirrored.
 Maybe you have not enough permissions to download these repositories?

* SLES10-SP2-Pool sles-10-x86_64
* SLES10-SP2-Pool sles-10-i586

However, if you try and disable that repository with smt-catalogs -d, SMT is gonna quit your action with " 0 repositories disabled". Since I didn’t want the error to show up again, here’s a quick way on how to disable it.

Open up a mysql shell (mysql -u root -p preferably) and enter those queries:

Creating a custom RPM repository for SMT

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:59:45 +0000

I spent some time yesterday figuring out ways on how to assign custom (as in self-built) RPMs to a installation using SMT. First you obviously need a " external" repository, that can be integrated into the SMT.

So we need to create repository someplace, where the SMT can go and grab it. I ain’t gonna cover the sharing part, since that is your job! I’m just gonna cover the steps on how to create the custom repository and how to integrate it into the SMT.

Active Directory authentification for Samba on SLES11

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:46:25 +0000

I recently “redesigned” the PXE-installation server, which comes with a Samba service to easily move files on/off the box. The old one had the restriction, you need to create local user accounts. Since I also did an distribution upgrade, I wanted to try the integration of SLES11 into Active Directory.

And as it turns out, it really is simple. Just follow the steps outlined in the handbook.

Open the Windows Domain Membership module, yast samba-client (or yast, then Network Services -> Windows Domain Membership) and enter your Domain information
Open the Samba Server Module, yast samba-server (or yast, then Network Services -> Samba Server) and also enter your Domain information

Just make sure, you also check the box labeled Also Use SMB Information for Linux Authentication, otherwise it won’t work – don’t ask me why …

New vmware-tools-kmp

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:31:04 +0000

Disclaimer: I don’t take any responsibility for faults within the software, I just provide the RPM’s! Feel free to ask me about stuff concerning these RPM’s, but I ain’t accountable if your stuff goes kaboom! Oh, and those RPM’s aren’t recommended or supported by VMware!

Since we recently upgraded our VMware Infrastructure to VMware vSphere, I finally had a chance to refresh the RPM’s for the KMP for 2.6.16.60-0.39.3-0.1 and 2.6.27.21-0.1. You can find the source RPM here.

Novell KMP: vmware-tools-kmp and ibm-lin_tape-kmp

Sun, 10 May 2009 11:27:22 +0000

Disclaimer: I don’t take any responsibility for faults within the software, I just provide the RPM’s! Feel free to ask me about stuff concerning these RPM’s, but I ain’t accountable if your stuff goes kaboom … Oh, and those RPM’s aren’t recommended or supported by Novell or IBM!

After working with the novell-kmp solution, I think it’s actually rather easy to create a " Kernel Module Package". In the end, I created two additional KMP’s, one for the tools component of the VMware-Tools shipped with VMware ESX, and another for the lin_tape SCSI driver, used by our IBM TS3400 as well as the IBM TS7530.