suse

There exists a bug in the Yast firewall scripts for configuring access to a DHCP server. DHCP requires broadcasting capability but the Yast firewall script does not enable this by default. In order to fix the problem ensure the following two directives are set in the /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2 script:

FW_SERVICES_EXT_UDP="bootps"
FW_ALLOW_FW_BROADCAST="yes bootps"

Setting these two directives will allow the DHCP server to broadcast its availability to the rest of the network without having to lower your server's firewall.

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):

This mirror in Australia contains a very complete SuSE/OpenSUSE mirror and is quite fast. It contains everything you would need from ISOs to updates in one handy place.

OpenSUSE 10 has been available since last week.
I downloaded a copy over the weekend and installed it this evening. The first major difference is the cool little animated bootloader on the CD. Another nice touch is the installer that tells you how long before you must insert another of the CDs. It means you can time coffee and toilet breaks during the install without coming back to find the computer sitting there with its drive open waiting for you to put another disk in.
Overall OpenSUSE is pretty much the same as SuSE 9.3 except all the software versions are slightly newer. Its good to see the open source license apply to everything in the distribution but if you are after non-open source software (such as Java, Acrobat or video codecs) then checkout this page:

For a while there I did not use SuSE a lot as I preferred Red Hat/Fedora's purer file system approach and the Gnome desktop environment (KDE is the default on SuSE). Over the last few months though I am going back to SuSE more and more because of two things: Yast and the way they organise their file system (which is kind of ironic).

Over the last week I have been doing quite a bit of work with SuSE, Samba3 and OpenLDAP. I must say although difficult to setup the first time it is really nice to have all your user accounts managed from one central location. I have just installed a new SuSE server running this combination into a clients office and it is looking very good indeed. All of the basic work is done all that needs to happen now is get all the Windows machines bound the domain and install the printer drivers onto the server for painless printer adding.

Some useful links I have found to help set all this up are: