March 11, 2010, 3:24 pm
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!
March 11, 2010, 2:48 pm
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!
March 4, 2010, 2:28 pm
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.