SME Server on Scientific Linux

	Note:
	This is a work in progress, and full functionality has not been tested yet. Please note that SME Server 9.0 is still in alpha stage and may not work properly. Do not use on production servers!

The SME Server distribution is based on CentOS. Since CentOS is a derivative of RHEL, it is possible to install the SME Server functionalities on top of other (virtually 100% binary compatible) RHEL derivatives, including CentOS itself.

This possibility may be interesting for organisations that have a software policy in place that prevents the deployment of a server OS not listed as an allowed OS within such a policy. Typically large enterprises, governmental and university related organisations have and enforce such a policy.

Scientific Linux has the following introduction:

SL is a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities around the world. Its primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for the various experimenters. The base SL distribution is basically Enterprise Linux, recompiled from source. Our main goal for the base distribution is to have everything compatible with Enterprise, with only a few minor additions or changes. Examples of items that were added are Alpine, and OpenAFS. Our secondary goal is to allow easy customization for a site, without disturbing the Scientific Linux base. The various labs are able to add their own modifications to their own site areas. By the magic of scripts, and the anaconda installer, each site is to be able to create their own distributions with minimal effort. Or, if a user wishes, they can simply install the base SL release.

SME Server 9.0 on top of Scientific Linux

The installation instructions of SME Server functionality are based on minimal installation of Scientific Linux 6.3 64-bit and SME Server 9.0alpha1 repository. Please use a virtual environment to test your results. Virtual environments may include e.g. VirtualBox (free), VMWare, KVM or Xen.

Install SL minimal

SME Server functionality is only tested with a minimal install of Scientific Linux. To be able to install 'SL minimal' one must use the DVD install ISO. Other available downloads like the LiveCD etc. do not have the option to install 'SL minimal'.

You can download the SL DVD install CD from either here, here or here. Install SL minimal in your virtual environment which should have at least:

• 1Gb RAM memory
• 20Gb harddisk
• 1 Network interface bridged to your host network interface
• Internet access

When using the SL install DVD you have the option to select what to install. Please select 'minimal' and leave all other options as per their defaults.

Once the installation has finished, please reboot and continue with enabling networking and SSH.

Enable networking and SSH

Login as root with the password what was provided at installation time. To enable networking please issue:

ifup eth0

This will bring up eth0 based on your local available DHCP server. Please check you IP with 'ipconfig' and 'ip link show'. During the configuration of SME Server functionality, final and fixed IP addresses will be configured. To enable SSH please issue:

service sshd start

SSH will now be enabled. Please log in remotely via SSH and further instructions are based on the fact that you are remotely logged in via ssh. Specifically for Cut and Paste operations.

Install nano

If you are not familiar with vi or vim, you can install the nano editor. This page assumes that you have installed nano. Please install nano as follows by issuing as root on the console:

yum install nano

Disable SELinux

SELinux is enabled by default. We want to disable it for there are a few services (e.g. httpd) that get blocked by SELinux. To check the status of SELinux you can enter the command:

getenforce

SELinux uses policies that conflict with some of the SME Server services ports like https. One can adjust the allowed ports, or remove the SELinux policies and disable SELinux by the following commands:

setenforce 0
sed -i -e 's/SELINUX=.*/SELINUX=disabled/g' /etc/selinux/config
yum remove selinux-policy-targeted

Add SME Server repo's

To be able to download the required packages we need to add the SME Server repo's. The auto-selected (closest) mirror may not be the fastest, and you may want to hash out the 'mirrorlist=' line entries and replace them with 'baseURL=' with a repo location of your choice. Please see this the download locations overview.

The below example uses a fixed URl to download the RPM's. In general this URL is fast and reliable so there is no immediate need to change these URL's.

To add the smeos9 repo's please copy the below text in the block and and issue the following commands:

nano -w /etc/yum.repos.d/smeos9.repo

and paste the following into the new '/etc/yum.repos.d/smeos9.repo' file

[smeos9]
enabled=1
BaseURL=http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/smeserver/releases/testing/9/smeos/$basearch
name=SME Server9 - os
gpgcheck=1
enablegroups=1
gpgkey = http://mirror.contribs.org/releases/testing/9/smeos/$basearch/RPM-GPG-KEY-SMEServer

[smeupdates9]
enabled=1
BaseURL=http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/smeserver/releases/testing/9/smeupdates/$basearch
name=SME Server9 - updates
gpgcheck=1
enablegroups=1
gpgkey = http://mirror.contribs.org/releases/testing/9/smeos/$basearch/RPM-GPG-KEY-SMEServer

[smeupdates-testing9]
enabled=1
BaseURL=http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/smeserver/releases/testing/9/smeupdates-testing/$basearch
name=SME Server9 - updates testing
gpgcheck=1
enablegroups=1
gpgkey = http://mirror.contribs.org/releases/testing/9/smeos/$basearch/RPM-GPG-KEY-SMEServer

Yum install

To ensure that none of the CentOS specific packages are going to be installed, we first put in place the sl specific versions from the sl repository.

yum --disablerepo=smeos9 install dhcp* httpd* mod_ssl ntp* openssl* dhclient yum redhat-logos

This will result in the following summary. The numbers may vary depending on the changes in the repositories.

Transaction Summary
Install      36 Package(s)
Upgrade       4 Package(s)
Total download size: 19 M

Now we can install the packages from the SME Server repository. To make sure that all dependecies required for SME Server are met, we will disable the sl repositories for now, and will do a yum upgrade after this initial upgrade with all repo's enabled.

---

yum install e-smith\* smeserver\* aspell aspell-en at audit-libs-python autoconf automake bc bind-libs bind-utils dosfstools ed eject elfutils elfutils-libs fetchmail ftp gettext glib gpm hesiod hmaccalc imake iptraf iptstate isdn4k-utils libXdmcp libgomp libselinux-python libsmbclient libsysfs libxml2-python lm_sensors lockdev lsof lvm2 m2crypto man mcstrans minicom mkbootdisk mlocate mtools mt-st mutt neon net-snmp net-snmp-utils openldap-servers patch pcmciautils postgresql-libs pyxf86config rpm-build rp-pppoe setserial strace sudo sysfsutils syslinux tcpdump telnet time tmpwatch traceroute unzip usbutils usermode vim-common vim-enhanced wget wodim xz zip php-pear-Net-URL perl-Compress-Raw-Bzip2 perl-IO-Compress-Bzip2 rsync tnef freeradius-ldap --exclude=centos*,smeserver-release --disablerepo=sl* --nogpg

---

This will result in the following summary. The numbers may vary depending on the changes in the repositories.

Transaction Summary
Install     483 Package(s)
Upgrade      14 Package(s)
Total download size: 223 M

Yum upgrade

After the initial yum install we need to upgrade to the latest versions available in the repositories. To prevent conflicts between the SME and sl repo's, the sl repo's will be given priority over the SME Server repo's. For this yum-priorities needs to be instaled:

yum install yum-priorities

Then we can add the following line to each of the sl repo's. A good place would be right under the 'enabled=' line.

priority=1

Now we can do the yum upgrade with all repo's enabled without having conflicts:

yum upgrade --nogpg

This will result in the below summary. The numbers may vary depending on the changes in the repositories.

Transaction Summary Install
1 Package(s) Upgrade
10 Package(s)
Total download size: 37 M

Post-upgrade/reboot

The installation of SME Server functionality is finished. For the initial configuration the following commands are mandatory:

/sbin/e-smith/signal-event post-upgrade
/sbin/e-smith/signal-event reboot

	Note:
	Please note that as of this point SME Server functionality is in place and in control. This means that your normal admin tasks have to be adapted to the SME Server principales described in the Administration Manual.

First use

Set root password

After the first boot, there is the opportunity to restore from a backup and a new root (admin) password will be asked. This may be the same as you used for the initial installation of SL or you can set a new one. After setting the root password, SME Server will configure additional settings and automatically reboot.

Enable ssh access

Since we are now in SME Server mode, we need to enable ssh acces the 'SME Server way'. To enable ssh access from this point on, please issue the following commands:

db configuration setprop sshd status enabled
db configuration setprop sshd PermitRootLogin yes
db configuration setprop sshd acccess public 
db configuration setprop sshd PasswordAuthentication yes
/sbin/e-smith/signal-event remoteaccess-update

Now one can remotely ssh in to the server, which makes it easier to execute the remaining steps.

Reset MySQL root password

SME Server uses a secure random password for the MySQL root user. A new MySQL root password has to be generated to overwrite the SL root MySQL password so that it is compliant with SME Server inner workings. There should be no reason to change or use the MySQL password, so we strongly advise you never to change or use the MySQL root password, even though many how-to's or (web)applications will tell you they 'require' this'. You can grant permissions to a (new) MySQL user for a certain database as system root. How to do this is explained here. As root issue the following commands:

cd /var/service/mysqld
sv d .
/sbin/e-smith/expand-template /root/.my.cnf
/sbin/e-smith/expand-template /var/service/mysqld/set.password
/usr/libexec/mysqld --bootstrap --user=mysql --skip-grant-tables < ./set.password
sv u .

Adjust yum repositories

By default SME Server assumes it has CentOS as base linux system, In this case we use Scientific Linux, so we have to remove the CentOS specific repo's and add the SL repo's.

To remove the CentOS specific repo's issue the following commands as root:

db yum_repositories delete base
db yum_repositories delete addons
db yum_repositories delete centosplus
db yum_repositories delete contrib
db yum_repositories delete extras

and add SL repo's the 'SME Server way'

TBA

and update and activate the revised yum repo's configuration with the following command:

signal-event yum-modify

Configuration

When the system has rebooted, it is ready for SME Server configuration of network and services settings. To start this process, please login as root and type:

console

and select 'configure this server'. After configuration, the server will reboot itself, re-configure itself based on the user choices and is in full operational mode ready for full use.

Current status

The above instructions should have brought you 'on par' with the current developments here.