Johan Kotze – openSUSE Lizards

NetworkManager and keyring

Johan Kotze — Fri, 15 May 2009 21:36:55 +0000

Tonight I stumbled upon the solution to a irritating little problem I have had for a long time. I use autologin and every time I log in I get prompted for my keyring password in order to access the wireless network. I have googled for this problem numerous times in the past without any luck. All the suggested solutions had to do with Ubuntu and a tool called libpam-keyring. This does not seem to work the same on openSuSE as on Ubuntu and did not help me much. Then I found this post. Towards the bottom of the thread is the instructions that have been evading me for so long. Hope this helps someone else.

Getting GroupWise 8 client to work on openSUSE 11.1

Johan Kotze — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:46:32 +0000

Since openSUSE 11.1 has gone gold and GroupWise 8 has been around for a while, I decided to install openSUSE 11.1 with KDE 4.1 on my laptop. I use GroupWise and when I tried to install the GroupWise rpm’s, it complained about missing dependancies. I had to install the following software in order for GroupWise 8 to work:

openmotif, openmotif22-libs and libstdc++33

Once that was installed the GroupWise rpm’s installed without any problems

Setting up a simple router

Johan Kotze — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:39:58 +0000

Today I spent the best part of the morning to configure a SLES 10 SP2 server as a simple router. I googled quite a lot and could not find a nice and concise post on how to configure SLES 10 as a simple router, so I thought I’ll write up my experiences in the hopes that it will help someone. Although this was done on SLES 10 I am pretty sure it will apply to openSUSE as well.

My setup is as follows: Local lan is 192.168.0.0/24 and I want a private lan on 192.168.1.0/24 so that I can run stuff like DHCP and PXE without upsetting everyone on the network. I have a SLES 10 server with 2 network cards: eth1 connected to the local lan and eth0 connected to my private switch. The local lan is connected via ADSL to the Internet and I need my private network to also be able to connect to the Internet.

The first thing did was to configure the ADSL router to send all traffic for my private network to the ip of the SLES 10 server on the local lan. In the case of our ADSL router it involved adding a custom route.

Next I started YasT on the SLES 10 server and under “Network Devices”, Network Card”, I selected “Edit” on one of the network cards and selected “Routing” and then enabled “IP forwarding”.

Then I edited the firewall settings and assigned the network card connected to the local lan to the external zone and the network card connected to the private network to the internal zone.

I did not enable masquerading as I wanted to be able to connect to machines on my private network from the local lan.

I then configured DHCP and DNS on the SLES 10 server and connected a machine to my private network and it was able to lease an IP address and resolve DNS queries. It did not however allow me to connect to anything outside the private lan.

After much googling and trying all sorts of iptables commands, I finally found a post that mentioned something about editing /etc/sysconfig/SuSEfirewall2. This can also be done via Yast, “System”, “etc/Sysconfig Editor”, which is the way I did it.

I had to change the following settings in Network → Firewall → SuSEfirewall2 :

FW_DEV_EXT: ensure that it contains the device of the external interface (eth1 on the local lan in my case)

FW_DEV_INT: ensure that it contains the device of the internal interface (eth0 on the private lan in my case)

FW_ROUTE: yes

FW_MASQUERADE: no

FW_FORWARD: This was the magic line for me. This needs to contain a space separated list of what you will allow. In my case I just put 192.168.0.0/24,192.168.1.0/24 192.168.1.0/24,192.168.0.0/24 192.168.0.1/24,0/0. This allows all traffic between the local lan and the private lan and allows the private lan to connect to the Internet.

The comments and help in YasT is comprehensive and made it quite easy to understand the meaning of each of the fields.

I had to restart the firewall after I made the changes.

I hope someone finds this useful.

Parralel processing in zypper

Johan Kotze — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:48:53 +0000

I have been on leave for a couple of days and today when I booted my laptop the openSUSE updater notified me of 4 security updates. While I was watching zypper updating the system (I prefer the command line client) I wondered if it would be possible for zypper to download and install patches/programs/etc asynchronously. To explain better: instead of downloading a patch and then installing it, why can’t zypper download the patch and then start a process/tread to install it while it immediately starts to download the next file ? I have no knowledge of the internals of zypper or yast, so I don’t know it it even feasible, but it would decrease the time needed to patch the system.

Introductions

Johan Kotze — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:54:34 +0000

I recently became an openSUSE member and good manners dictate that I introduce myself.

My name is Johan Kotze and I work as a pre-sales engineer for Novell. I live in Paarl, South Africa – a beautiful town in the Cape winelands. I am married and have a 5 year old daugther (yes she does have her daddy wrapped around her little finger )

Like all geeks I like to play with new stuff, so my primary contribution to openSUSE is to try out all the new releases and file bug reports. I run openSUSE on all of my machines at work and at home and spread the word whenever I can.

My other interests include programming (pascal and C#) and bird watching (the feathered kind) and traveling. I’ll gladly give advice to anyone wanting travel info on Souther Africa.

I am currently running openSUSE 11 with KDE 4.1 on my primary laptop (a Lenovo T61p). It took me a while to figure out that you to have to click on the little kidney thing in the right corner before you can move plasmoids around on the taskbar.

I will try (no promises) to blog about my experiences with openSUSE and other open source software.