SME on CentOS 6
SME 9, based on CentOS 6
An overview of related SME9 development pages can be found here.
Prerequisites
- VIrtual machine (Vmware, Parallels or Virtualbox)
- Centos Minimal 64-bit architecture. 32-bit may follow later
Access to EPEL, RPMForge and ATrpms repositories- Setting up a RPM Building environment
User Feedback
Unstructured user feedback can be noted here: SME9DEV user feedback. Issues that require developers attention should be logged in our Bug Tracker. (See below)
Bugs
Considerations
- Primary and only goal for now is the transition of SME Server based on CentOS 5.8 to SME Server based on CentOS6.3
- SysVinit is no longer the default with the release of RHEL6, beyond RHEL6 systemd will be used
- perl has a new location of the filesystem. New: /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl instead Old: /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/
- perl version 5.8.8 is the new default version on RHEL6. This requires a review of all the perl module rpms which are specific for perl 5.8.5
Installing CentOS 6 minimal
First a few notes on CentOS 6 minimal, which is a bare bones install with very little on board. You can download a copy from one of the CentOS mirrors here
- As per above note, only use Virtual Machine for testing purposes. A good free VM package can be obtained here
- You might want to note down as much as possible so you yourself and others can reproduce the actions
- Don't use yum with the '-y' flag (install/upgrade without further user interaction) when using the yum install/upgrade commands. (beware copy/paste yum commands)
- you might want to note down all packages listed by yum to be installed/upgraded AND their dependencies
- Make regular snapshots of your Virtual Machine and describe them specifically. At least when you've reached an important milestone for yourself
Installing the ISO
- Just install a minimal el6 installation (I just installed a few utilities like htop, screen, rsync, vim, openssh-clients mc etc…). You can use either the DVD, the minimal CD install, a net install with PXE, it's up to you
- wellsi: I have used CentOS-6.3-x86_64-minimal.iso
Enable networking
Each boot you have to start the network etc etc. I decided it was better with the minimal install and touch as little as possible - if I could then get SME packages installed I could then use that to configure networking later.
To start the networking
./etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-eth eth0
or
dhclient eth0
or if you want to assign a specific IP address (e.g. 192.168.1.2).
ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.2
echo "nameserver 192.168.1.254" >> /etc/resolv.conf
route add default gw 192.168.1.254 eth0
To make your changes permanent you will need to edit the configuration file to make it active on boot. There is only the vi text editor, you can also install nano.
yum install nano
nano /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
and set ONBOOT=”YES”
Enable SSH
SSH is present but is disabled at this stage. To enable ssh issue:
service sshd start
Disable SELinux
It will be easier to see what's going on (and turn off selinux at kernel level, just to be sure)
sed -i -e 's/rhgb quiet/selinux=0/g' /boot/grub/grub.conf
sed -i -e 's/SELINUX=.*/SELINUX=disabled/g' /etc/selinux/config
Remove selinux-policy-targeted and authconfig
They conflict with some e-smith/smeserver packages
yum remove selinux-policy-targeted authconfig
Configure basic requirements
Configure SME9 repositories
See the following bugs tracking issues with repositories:
Bug #7294: rpms that still need to be rebuilt or sourced for the SME9 repositoriesBug #7298: Import perl-Unix-ConfigFile from rpmforgeBug #7292: more rpms in the SME8 repositories that have a lower version in our SME9 repositoriesBug #7305: smeserver-yum doesn't provide the /etc/yum.smerepos.d dir
yum install wget
mkdir /tmp/repo.bak
mv /etc/yum.repos.d/*.repo /tmp/repo.bak/
wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/sme9.repo http://bugs.contribs.org/attachment.cgi?id=3623
Import needed GPG Keys
rpm --import http://sme-mirror.firewall-services.com/releases/8/smeos/x86_64/RPM-GPG-KEY-SMEServer
rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
rpm --import https://fedoraproject.org/static/217521F6.txt
rpm --import http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5
rpm --import http://www.salstar.sk/pub/yum/keys/RPM-GPG-KEY-Fedora-Pre-Extras
Clean yum cache
yum clean all
Install e-smith and smeserver packages
Now, you should be ready to install all the e-smith and smeserver packages (and their dependencies). This should pull about 400 packages
yum install smeserver\* e-smith\* --enablerepo=smeos8,smeupdates8
It should install the following packages and their dependancies. See here how to retrieve a list of the required packages from an installed SME8 server.
e-smith e-smith-LPRng e-smith-apache e-smith-backup e-smith-devtools e-smith-dynamicdns-dyndns e-smith-dynamicdns-dyndns.org e-smith-dynamicdns-tzo e-smith-dynamicdns-yi e-smith-flexbackup e-smith-horde e-smith-hosts e-smith-imp e-smith-ingo e-smith-ldap e-smith-lib-compspec e-smith-mysql e-smith-ntp e-smith-oidentd e-smith-openssh e-smith-php e-smith-pptpd e-smith-proftpd e-smith-proxy e-smith-qmailanalog e-smith-quota e-smith-radiusd e-smith-turba e-smith-viewlogfiles smeserver-release
Move everything from rc7.d to rc4.d
All the links in rc4.d should then point to e-smith-service
rm -f /etc/rc4.d/*
cp -a /etc/rc7.d/* /etc/rc4.d/
Install a few missing packages
See the following bugs:
Bug #7233: e-smith-ldap should require openldap-serversBug #7252: e-smith-radiusd should require freeradius-ldapBug #7234: e-smith-apache should require mod_sslBug #7297: e-smith-hosts should require dhcp
yum install mod_ssl freeradius-ldap openldap-servers dhcp
Move some perl modules
We need to copy some perl modules to a new directory, because @INC has changed in EL6:
cp -a /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/esmith/* /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/esmith
Create a service entry for rsyslog
We need to create a new service entry in the DB, because the standard syslog package is now rsyslog:
- See
Bug #7221: Change from syslog to rsyslogandBug #7322: Change from syslog to rsyslog - Add linkThis step can be removed when e-smith-base-5.4.0-8 is available.
/sbin/e-smith/db configuration set rsyslog service status enabled
cp -a /etc/rc7.d/S05syslog /etc/rc4.d/S05rsyslog
Run post-upgrade
We can now try to post-upgrade
/sbin/e-smith/signal-event post-upgrade
/sbin/e-smith/signal-event reboot
The system boots but completly broken :-)
Ok, so the system should now boot, but is really not usable, after a quick look, at least the following doesn't work as expected:
- The console on the first boot don't really work. It asks for the admin password
(and BTW the password appears in cleartext)but it's all No network interfaces are detected by the console menu (because kudzu is not installed, only available in SME repo, and require an older python which conflicts with the the one * from EL6)- slapd won't start
- httpd won't start
- squid won't start
- manually running expand-template has no effect (and no error message is printed). But signal-event seems to work (files get expanded and services restarted)
- as the network interface are not configured, all the services which requires the internel IP (or the external one) in their config (at least sshd squid and dnscache) won't start
qpsmtpd won't start (can't locate Qpsmtpd/TcpServer.pm in @INC)- There's probably a lot more which is not working
- wellsi: Is there an easy way to get SSH access to it at this point?
SME Server specific/required packages
To get a list of all specific SME Server packages you can run:
rpm -qa | grep 'smeserver\|e-smith'| sed -e 's/-[0-9].*//' | sort > smeserver-packages.txt
SME Server specific/required perl packages
To get a list of the file names containing the string 'perl' on a running SME8 server.
rpm -qa | grep perl | sed -e 's/-[0-9].*//' | sort
or, as per suggestion on the lists (All files starting with the string 'perl')
rpm -qa --qf '%{NAME}\n' name=perl\* | sort
To export the list to a plain text file you could do:
rpm -qa | grep perl | sed -e 's/-[0-9].*//' | sort > perl-list.txt
perl-Digest-SHA Y perl Y perl-Archive-Tar Y perl-Authen-PAM ****** perl-Authen-SASL Y perl-BSD-Resource ****** perl-CGI-FormMagick ****** perl-CGI-Persistent ****** perl-Class-ParamParser ****** perl-Clone Y perl-Compress-Raw-Bzip2 Y perl-Compress-Raw-Zlib Y perl-Compress-Zlib Y perl-Convert-ASN1 Y perl-Convert-BinHex Y perl-Convert-TNEF ****** perl-Crypt-Cracklib ****** perl-Crypt-OpenSSL-Bignum Y perl-Crypt-OpenSSL-Random Y perl-Crypt-OpenSSL-RSA Y perl-DateManip Y perl-DBD-MySQL Y perl-DBI Y perl-Digest-HMAC Y perl-Digest-SHA1 Y perl-Email-Date-Format Y perl-Encode-Detect Y perl-Error Y perl-File-MMagic ****** perl-Geography-Countries ****** perl-HTML-Parser Y perl-HTML-Tabulate ****** perl-HTML-Tagset Y perl-I18N-AcceptLanguage ****** perl-IO-Compress-Base Y perl-IO-Compress-Bzip2 Y perl-IO-Compress-Zlib Y perl-IO-Socket-INET6 Y perl-IO-Socket-SSL Y perl-IO-stringy Y perl-IO-Zlib Y perl-IP-Country ****** perl-LDAP Y perl-libwww-perl Y perl-Locale-gettext ****** perl-Mail-DKIM Y perl-Mail-RFC822-Address ****** perl-Mail-SPF ****** perl-MailTools Y perl-MIME-Lite Y perl-MIME-tools Y perl-Net-DNS Y perl-Net-Ident ****** perl-Net-IP Y perl-Net-IPv4Addr ****** perl-Net-SMTP-SSL Y perl-Net-SSLeay Y perl-NetAddr-IP Y perl-Object-Persistence ****** perl-Package-Constants Y perl-Quota ****** perl-Razor-Agent ****** perl-RPM2 ****** perl-Socket6 Y perl-suidperl Y perl-Test-Inline ****** perl-Text-Iconv Y perl-Text-Template ****** perl-Time-TAI64 ****** perl-TimeDate Y perl-Unix-ConfigFile ****** perl-URI Y perl-version Y perl-WWW-Automate ****** perl-XML-NamespaceSupport Y perl-XML-Parser Y perl-XML-SAX Y
I am now going to try and lob in the existing/missing el5 versions to see what happens. My guess is we will need to rebuild the required modules.
FormMagick
Next will be an attack on FormMagick - there is no package in the default install so need to figure that out. In may indeed be horrible, but we can live with it for now.
Hopefully with perl and FormMagick installed, most of the SME stuff *should* basically install.
- Please consult/subscribe to the devs list for more information. devinfo mailinglist and in particular all threads starting with " SME on CentOS 6"
- There is a IRC channel where people who are interested in this effort 'hang out'. You're most welcome to drop by and/or join. It's free! ;-)
- You do not have to install anything to pay the channel a visit. All you need is a nice nickname and right click here to open the channel in a new browser window or tab.
Resources and references
Kickstart file
- A starting point can be found on the SME9 Kickstart page.