linux

The Jem Report has a great article explaining how to get all those non-open source applications (Java, Flash, Acrobat, etc) into your OpenSUSE system without much stress.

Mad Pengiun has a comprehensive howto for setting up a FreeNX server (complete with SSH encryption) on SUSE 10. FreeNX is a very fast Virtual Networking Computing (VNC) server/client alternative that operates a lot faster than conventional options.

Last week I sat and passed by Novell Certified Linux Professional exam. It was a very tough test of lots of random Linux topics. My exam covered Samba, remote logging, logrotate and xinetd in two and a half hours. Given the variety of different tasks you had to perform the two and a half hours went very quickly. A lot of the later parts of the questions required a good read of quite a few man records in order to get just the right syntax for the respective command. Fortunately Novell helped out in a few occasions with some nice little hints for those who were a little stuck (or did not know where to start).

The test was quite unique in that whilst it was held at Novell in Wellington the actual test environment (two independent servers) were in Utah and accessed via VNC in a web browser. This made things a little tricky because there was a large amount of lag. This made typing commands really tricky sometimes as a single typo would result in a thirty second delay whilst you painstakingly fixed the error. Just to add injury to insult the tab key on the laptop supplied did not perform any tab actions within the VNC terminals. This meant that any ncurses based interfaces were out (like terminal based Yast). Everything had to be done by key commands or through the slow KDE interface. The funny thing was I had read the book that was meant to build you up for the exam but the subject matter covered in the exam compared to example questions and content in the book had almost no relation. Consequently I ended up learning quite a bit during the exam (probably a first) which in retrospect was actually pretty cool.

Apparently I was the first person in New Zealand to pass the exam on their first attempt. I am not surprised at this given the difficulty of the questions (especially compared to exam preparation material), the client/server delays and the pass mark being set at a very high 85%. I did really well on the logging and xinetd sections but had a bit of a nightmare on the Samba section. The server lag made Samba testing in the limited time span almost impossible plus I think my decision to use the binary tbdsam backend rather than sticking with the default (but insecure, slow and poorly extensible) smbpasswd file. I still ended up with a low 90% score which given the circumstances I was pretty happy with. The ultimate irony that I had never used SUSE Enterprize 9 before my exam (and probably never will). All my past and future experience has been with SUSE Pro and OpenSUSE.

Getting Rails up and running on Apache2 on SUSE is takes a little work as at the moment Rails is not part of the the SUSE software updates network. This means you must build Rails (and Ruby if using SuSE < 9.3) and the FastCGI development kit from source.

1. First off it you need Ruby 1.8.2 (or greater) to run Rails. If you have a version less than this you will need to compile and install Ruby from source.
Install GCC, make, the C devel, zlib and zlib-devel packages using Yast.
Download the latest version of Ruby from http://www.ruby-lang.org/
Untar the source file to /usr/local/src, compile and install (as root or sudo):

Getting a Linux server or workstation to work nicely with Novell's Border Manager can be very difficult. Novell have recently brought out a Linux version of their clntrust.exe application for Linux workstations (available in Border Manager 3.8 SP4) but this requires Gnome and the Novell Linux Client. If you are running a server (or use a non-Novell supported Linux distro) meeting these requirements can be difficult. Fortunately there is cl4others which authenticates to the Border Manager through simple command line instructions in a far more flexible manner. Documentation for cl4others is pretty sparse so I have written this little tutorial on how to get it set up and running.

find . -print0 | xargs -r0 touch