Archive for March 2010

Problems registrering SLES10 clones to a SMT server

First of all. If you don’t know what a SMT-server is you probably don’t need to read any further.

Problem: I was deploying a number of SLES10-SP3 servers in an ESX environment by cloning from a running server – and that all went according to plan. However, when I tried to register the servers to our SMT server the first registration went fine, but the following registrations simply overwrote the previous.

Solution: Google to the rescue!! Rename “deviceid” and “secret” (you could choose to delete them instead if you’re that kind of sys admin – I’m not!) in /etc/zmd and re-run the registration process:

clientSetup4SMT.sh --host <your  SMT server>

On some of the servers I also had to run

suse_register -r

in order to restore the repository list, but on others I had no issues – well, go figure!

Problems with name resolution on SLES10 in a .local domain

I noticed some strange behaviour on some SLES10-SP3 servers I was setting up in a .local domain. I could do a nslookup on the FQDN (<somehostname.local>), no problems there – but when trying to do a

ping <somehost>.local

it failed. I did a bit of searching on the internet and it turns out that SuSE (and as far as I could gather – other Linuxes as well) are haveing difficulties dealing with .local domains. The solution is to add the following to the end of /etc/host.conf

mdns off

And then do a reboot. Voila!

Howto generate a random password i an jiffy!

The following one-liner will generate a random eight character string consisting of numbers as well as upper- and  lowercase letters.

echo `< /dev/urandom tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 | head -c8`

or

tr -dc '0-9a-zA-Z' </dev/urandom |head -c8; echo

If you need a shorter or longer password you can ajust the “-c8”-value.

And yes, I know…… a password should contain special characters as well. Please feel free to add a few periods and asterisks :-)

I found this on the net somewhere. I don’t remember where – sorry.