[LON-CAPA-admin] updating suse

[Stuart Peter Raeburn]

Lars, 

There have been problems with ZMD in opensuse 10.1 (and 10.2?), and 
apparently ZMD will disappear from the future opensuse 10.3. 

In LON-CAPA, CHECKRPMS checks if rpms are up to date, and sends e-mail to 
the server administrator, if not,  The version of CHECKRPMS shipped with 
LON-CAPA 2.5.X performs this check using rug for SuSE 10.1 and 10.2, and you 
for SuSE 9.X (in opensuse, you was replaced by rug in 10.1 and 10.2) 

rug is a command line interface to the ZENworks Linux Management (ZLM) 
agent, so it requires ZMD. 

In light of the instability of ZMD and its future disappearance from 10.3, 
CHECKRPMS will be modified to use the command line tool "zypper" which does 
not require ZMD. 

If you wish to eliminate ZMD (and rug) you will need to modify
/usr/local/loncapa/bin/CHECKRPMS.  I hope to get a version built today 
(9/13) which uses zypper in place of rug for SuSE 10.X 

The command to update in zypper is: 

zypper up 

The command to list available updates is: 

zypper lu 

You can also use yast, but as that is a graphical tool, it will not itself 
be used in CHECKRPMS. 

All of these update tools can be used to update any packages maintained at 
openSUSE mirror sites (including many required by the LONCAPA-prequistes 
package).  However, they will not automatically update packages required by 
LON-CAPA which are unavailable from the mirror sites, but instead were built 
and placed in the LON-CAP repositories: http://install.loncapa.org/suse/
(For opensuse 10.2, this is a total of 22 packages). 

To date, the custom-built packages created for a particular SuSE 
version/architecture have not required update.  However, there is a need to 
improve CHECKRPMS so it will provide an alert to SuSE/SLES system 
administrators when these packages do need updating. Note: the checks for 
Fedora, Centos5 and RHEL5 which use yum already do this automatically.  In 
SuSE, to update any of the LON-CAPA built packages you would need to use 
yast (refresh the repository, and then perform the update interactively.
In yast:
Software -> Software Management -> Filter (Installation Summary), and then 
toggle the action from i to > for any packages needing updates. 

Stuart Raeburn
MSU LON-CAPA group 

Lars Jensen writes: 

> The lon-capa update instructions recommends to update suse with "rug
> update" - rug requires ZMD, the Novell Management Daemon, which
> doesn't seem stable at all. Are other ways of updating OK as well? For
> example is it OK to disable zmd and use Yast instead for updating.
> Will yast update all the lon-capa prequisites as well? 
> 
> Thanks,
> Lars.
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