cormander

yet another linux engineer

Reasons NOT to use SuSE Linux

I used to just dislike SuSE Linux. Well, it’s gotten to the point where I have become _very_ anti-SuSE Linux. This is a work-in-progress list of things I’ve run into that just blow me away.

Enjoy!


11/11/2008 1:39PM MST

In the partitioning section of autoyast I happened to notice:

Setting disk label of disk /dev/xvda to msdos

The default disk label is msdos? What??


11/6/2008 1:41PM MST

Upgradeing nfs-utils on a sles9 machine:

localhost:~ # rpm -Uvh nfs-utils-1.0.6-103.28.x86_64.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:nfs-utils              ########################################### [100%]
Updating etc/sysconfig/nfs...
..failed
localhost:~ #

The /etc/sysconfig/nfs file was wiped. Oh my.


11/5/2008 7:15AM MST

/usr/lib/YaST2/startup/Second-Stage/S05-config: line 20: initviocons: command not found

Autoyast dependency fail.


10/30/2008 8:58AM MST

Last login: Wed Oct 29 15:07:43 2008 from xxxx
Have a lot of fun...
-bash: /etc/sysconfig/suseconfig: Permission denied
-bash: /etc/sysconfig/mail: Permission denied
xxx@localhost:~>

Oh, nice. What the hell did that?


10/14/2008 8:58PM MST

SLES9 host with fs corruption, booted into single user mode so I could fsck it:

###########
reiserfsck --rebuild-tree started at Tue Oct 14 22:56:39 2008
###########

Pass 0:
####### Pass 0 #######
Loading on-disk bitmap .. ok, 1048830 blocks marked used
Skipping 8243 blocks (super block, journal, bitmaps) 1040587 blocks will be read
0%Mem-info:                                             left 1036371, 4216 /sec

...snip...

Swap cache: add 0, delete 0, find 0/0, race 0+0
Free swap:            0kB
264192 pages of RAM
78848 pages of HIGHMEM
3936 reserved pages
176256 pages shared
0 pages swap cached
Out of Memory: Killed process 1999 (fsck.reiserfs).
Terminated

Epic fail.


10/13/2008 4:25PM MST

I’m not sure who decided to do this, but it’s been burned into SuSE since as long as I can remember…

# cat /etc/motd
Have a lot of fun...

The message gets splashed across the terminal on every single login, until you zero out the file. No, I won’t have a lot of fun on a suse box.

Having a bad day, can you tell?


10/13/2008 10:30AM MST

Trying to configure postfix so it starts on machine bootup…

# chkconfig postfix on
insserv: Service boot.clock has to be enabled for service smtp
insserv: exiting now!
/sbin/insserv failed, exit code 1

Now, I’m all for enforcing dependencies for this, and it’s one thing that redhat currently doesn’t configure. But the boot.clock isn’t even a sysvinit style init script. So you’re requiring a sysvinit style init script to have a non-sysvinit style script be enabled?

Talk about not having standards.


10/13/2008 10:02AM MST

When suse goes to set its hostname from boot.localnet ….

test -n "$XHOSTNAME" && {
     echo -n Setting up hostname \'${XHOSTNAME%%.*}\'
     hostname ${XHOSTNAME%%.*}
     rc_status -v -r
}

First off, it gets its hostname from /etc/HOSTNAME. WTF? All caps? You’ve got to be KIDDING me!

Second, it slices off everything after the first dot. Talk about involuntary enforcement. If I wanted my hostname to be a single stub, I’d tell that the network configuration files.


9/30/2008 7:09PM MST

Fresh install of opensuse 10.3 with LDAP auth. After a reboot, the host was pingable but the console wouldn’t login and neither would ssh (it hung on auth packets). After several minutes, this get spit to the console:

Unknown username "gdm" in message bus configuration file
Unknown username "haldaemon" in message bus configuration file
Failed to start message bus: Could not get UID and GID for username "messagebus"

And logins start working again.

This just got installed. WTF.


9/30/2008 11:44AM MST

This one _really_ pisses me off. I tell autoyast I want 3 partitions; one for /boot to get 100MB, one for swap to get 2GB, and the rest to go to /

This is what it ends up giving me:

    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/xvda1   *           1          13      104391   83  Linux
/dev/xvda2              14        1306    10386022+   f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/xvda5              14         275     2104483+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/xvda6             276        1306     8281476   83  Linux

You’d think it would just do partitions 1, 2, and 3. But no, it has to go and create an extended partition for the second two. How brain dead is that? I mean, if I wanted an extended partition, I would have just used LVM.


9/29/2008 11:34PM MST

Booted a SLES9 server in single user mode…

(none):/# ls
/bin/ls: success: Permission denied
.   bin   boot.local  etc   install  media  opt   root  srv  tmp  var
..  boot  dev         home  lib      mnt    proc  sbin  sys  usr  www
(none):/#

Fail…. er, win? The ls command said success… then permission denied? But then shows the output of as expected?

I should also note, kernel panic shortly after.


9/24/2008 2:28PM MST:

Running a postfix update on opensuse 10.3 …

  Updating       : postfix                                           [2/6]
Updating etc/sysconfig/postfix...
Updating etc/sysconfig/mail...
Updating postfix configuration files
executing upgrade-configuration
Editing /etc/postfix/master.cf, adding missing entry for tlsmgr service

    Note: the following files or directories still exist but are no
    longer part of Postfix:

     /usr/share/doc/packages/postfix/README_FILES/QMQP_README

post-install modified etc/postfix/main.cf, updating MD5SUM
backing up etc/postfix/main.cf to etc/postfix/main.cf.2008-09-24
post-install modified etc/postfix/master.cf, updating MD5SUM
backing up etc/postfix/master.cf to etc/postfix/master.cf.2008-09-24
Starting SuSEconfig, the SuSE Configuration Tool...
Running module postfix only
Reading /etc/sysconfig and updating the system...
Executing /sbin/conf.d/SuSEconfig.postfix...
Installing new /etc/postfix/master.cf
Setting up postfix local as MDA...
Setting SPAM protection to "off"...
Installing new /etc/postfix/main.cf
Finished.

Gosh, now postfix won’t start because it messed with the configuration file. Oh, and that tidbit about ‘Setting SPAM protection to “off”‘, thanks a lot. It’s a good thing this wasn’t an automatic update.


9/23/2008 12:26PM MST:

“Some Intel cards don’t just not work with the new OpenSUSE beta, they can get bricked as well. Check your hardware before you install!”

http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/08/09/23/133258.shtml

Wow.