[olug] Suse 9.3 Pro download

[Dave Hull]

Quoting Brian Roberson <roberson at olug.org>:

> On Sun, Jul 10, 2005 at 11:27:05PM -0400, Dave Hull wrote:
>> Under SLES, when you update the kernel, the old one and it's modules
>> are removed from the system. If the new kernel doesn't work, oops.

> true - but are you saying you do not have a testing environment to 
> test new kernels?

No. I never said that.

> how many times have you ran into this? ( unable to boot after kern 
> update on suse )

Once, so far. On a Dell 2650 with a PERC 3/QC. SLES 9's difficulties with this
controller are well documented and supposedly fixed in SP1, but it was the
update to SP1 that caused it to fail. I've got SP2 downloading currently. I'm
told by tech support that it should work under SP2.

>> Secondly, the default rule set for RHEL/FC IPTables is simple. You can look
>> at it and make sense of it in fairly short order. Hence, maintaining it is
>> easy.
>>
>> Under SLES, the default rule set for IPTables is approximately a hundred
>> lines of overkill and as a result, it's difficult to maintain.

> yast firewall - cant get easier than that...

Right. Where exactly do I find the place where I can restrict given 
services to
a given IP address or range of addresses? And where do I find the menu option
to forward connections from one IP range to a different service and a 
myriad of
other IPTables options that the GUI wasn't designed to accomodate?

You're right, yast firewall is pretty easy, but it's very limiting in what it
allows you to do from the GUI. Hand editing /etc/sysconfig/iptables on RHEL is
pretty straight forward. Try hand editing the firewal on SLES, it's split
across three different config files, if my memory serves. I actually 
gave up on
it.

>> Thirdly, RHEL and FC3 (and up), both use up2date to keep systems patched
>> and to install new software and it will resolve dependencies for you 
>> automatically.
>> You can configure it to save old packages so you can "roll back" to a
>> previous version if needed. Up2date can be used from the command 
>> line which is nice on servers with no XWindows, and you can run it 
>> from cron
>> to keep systems updated automatically.
>>
>> SLES uses online_update from the command line, but you can't install new
>> packages with it. You can only update currently installed packages. To
>> install
>> new software you have to use Yast which is an XWindows or Curses gui
>> application.
>>
>> There are times when it's nice to run up2date <package> to install something
>> that you don't currently have on the system.

> yast sw_single
> or
> yast sw_single "packagename"

That's good to know. Thanks for the tip. Why isn't it documented in the yast
manpage? And what about "rolling back" to previous versions of software via
yast sw_single?

In addition to their excellent tech support, SLES' ability to simply 
and quickly
configure a server to act as a local YOU (Online Update) server is pretty cool
and the Install server configuration is also very cool.

-- 
Dave Hull
http://insipid.com