• dell 1950 2x Quad Core 2.0GHz Xeon; 8GB RAM; 200GB SAS RAID5 logical disk
• SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10

Contents 1 Xen 2 AppArmour 3 Firewall 4 Installation Source 5 EVMS 6 Initial Ramdisk 7 Registration/Activation

Xen

Fully functional Xen Dom0. /var/lib/xen/ resides in its own partition - this can be expaded or shrunk through evms

AppArmour

Firewall

Deimos is runnig an netfilter firewall. This firewall must be configured using yast. (launch yast and go to the security section). Currently needs to be started manually from Yast after a reboot. It's down at the moment as I didn't see much point in having it up, it's in the LAN -rfc

Installation Source

A crappy SLES10 installation server is running in the IS office. Deimos is set to look here for it's install disks when you try to add any software through yast. If you get any errors check the installation server is on and plugged in to the network!

EVMS

There is an issue with the evms volumes used on deimos. Yast complains when running the boot loader configuration tool and kernel updates appear to result in some strange entries in /boot/grub/menu.lst. However, it doesn't effect the correct entries for SLES10, SLES10 Xen, and SLES10 Failsafe.

Basically, don't bother to use Yast to configure the bootloader. There is no need to change it and in any case editing /boot/grub/menu.lst is straight forward.

At install time, yast is not clever enought to write a correct /etc/fstab. The boot partition must be a standard dos style partition, however when using other evms partitiona on the same disk, access to any standard partitions must be made by the evms system. The way to deal with this is to edit the fstab so that the device files for any vanilla partitions are referenced user /dev/evms. For example the deimos /boot partition is /dev/sda3 - this needs to be changed to /dev/evms/sda3 in the /etc/fstab

Initial Ramdisk

There are some modules missing from the default initial ramdisk for the kernel. I have edited /etc/sysconfig/kernel to include support for uhci_hcd, ehci_hcd, usbhid and usb_storage. A module for vfat should probably be included as well as this is likely to be the filesystem present on any usb mass storage devices.

This is so that if there are any problems while the kernel is loading the rest of the operating system, we will be able to use some useful debugging tools like a keyboard ;-) (Deimos has no ps/2 support and there are no usb drivers built in to the linux kernel - these have to be loaded as modules.)

After an issue with the system failing to boot correctly I'm suspecting that mkinitrd isn't being run with the correct options when the system has updated the kernel. If the system fails to boot fully with a message about not being able to find /dev/evms/lvm2/system/fs-root then something is missing from the initial ramdisk. To deal with this you must boot the server from the SLES10amd64emt54 Installation CD1 disk and select Rescue System from the menu.

Once the Rescue System has loaded you need to mount the / and /boot filesystems from the harddisk:

• run /sbin/evms_activate
• create a mount point in the temp directory: /tmp/mnt
• mount the root filesystem: mount /dev/evms/lvm2/systen/fs-root /tmp/mnt
• mount the boot filesystem: mount /dev/evms/sda3 /tmp/mnt/boot

Next, you need to create the new initial ramdisk:

• cd into the root filesystem from the harddisk: cd /tmp/mnt
• change root: chroot .
• Check the root changed ok: pwd
• the result of the previous command should be: /
• create the new ramdisk: mkinitrd -f "evms lvm2"
• check that new/updated ramdisk files are present in the /boot partition: ls -lt /boot
• The files should be ordered by modification time, with the newest at the top of the list
• The ramdisk files will be in the form: initrd-<kernel version number>
• Check that the syslink /boot/initrd is pointing to the latest version of the initrd-<kernel version> file: ls -l /boot/initrd

If you are happy with every thing, type exit to restore the original root. Then unmount the partitions.

• exit the chroot jail: exit
• Move out of the file systems you want to unmount: cd ..
• Unmount the /boot filesystem (note the spelling of the command): umount mnt/boot
• Unmount the / root filesystem: umount mnt
• reboot the server: reboot

Registration/Activation

Don't bother trying to activate the operating system the way it wants you to! ;-)

Try this instead....

# suse_register -a email=support@varndean.ac.uk -a regcode-sles=CC6C963F224F48