Wednesday, July 25, 2012

upgrading my home server to openSUSE-12.1

As always I wonder, which difficulties I am going to face and how easy it will be to overcome them. Wish me luck!
Next computer to upgrade will be my ASUS laptop then.

Update 13:MM:
Watching the installation log output and noticing all these packages, that will quite likely never get made use of, it's always intriguing to consider removing lots of those packages. But then: remember dependency hell! You will only get rid of packages with a fresh install. And you usually do fresh installs only, if there is nothing to upgrade from, because essentially you have to make all your old adaptions again and again. And that's what you rather want to avoid at all.

Update 2012-07-28 10:00
The crontab had gotten screwed somehow: /usr/bin/crontab is no longer editable for others, instead the trusted users now have to be a member of the trusted group.

Update 2012-08-12 08:45
I had not been able to log in to this machine using "ssh -X" since the upgrade, i.e. there was no "$DISPLAY" to display X applications on the originating machine.
I had a separate article created on this blog on the "ssh -X" issue, and I completed this story over there as well.

On the target machine side this appeared in syslog, whenever I logged in using "ssh -X" instead of simply using "ssh" without "-X":
"sshd[PID]: error: Failed to allocate internet-domain X11 display socket."
Apparently there are two different ways to fix this on the target machine side:

Fix#1:
  • add "AddressFamily inet" in /etc/ssh/sshd_config; "inet" stands for "use IPv4 only";
  • adding "AddressFamily any", in order to allow both IPv4 and also IPv6, did not work for me;
  • of course: stop+start (or whatever) the sshd in order for this to have any effect.
Fix#2
  • enable IPv6;
  • this path looks far more future oriented to me.
Sounds to me, like these recipes are not to be used together.
I found the recipes (using DuckDuckGo) on ubuntu and opensuse forums (Latin plural is "fora").
First I went the fix#1 way, afterwards the fix#2 way, that's what has been successfully in place since then.

Update 2012-08-15
"Of course" the mail server set-up did not work any longer, although it had worked until the OS upgrade. Getting that working again (through YaST) wasn't a big deal, but yet another P.I.T.A. .
I just hope, there is no more trouble with the OS upgrade.

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