SME on CentOS 6

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Please only use a virtual machine to test this.Try to follow what others have done and repeat it. Make any notes yourself and post your findings.

SME 9, based on CentOS 6

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

Current status

  • Last update Januari 23st, 2013
  • Identify all SME Server specific packages (John C.) See notes below.
  • Setting up a RPM building environment (Ian W.)
  • booting CentOS 6 with the SME packages installed. (Daniel)
  • Notes:
    • Some RPMs need to be got from EPEL, RPMForge and ATrpms
    • Needs a hack in yum-priority.conf
    • selinux-policy-targeted and authconfig need to be removed
    • You have to completely disable SELinux in /etc/sysconfig/selinux
    • LOTS of things are broken, but then that's no great surprise.
    • If we have a booting system we can start to look at fixing it.
    • nke has been playing on 32 bit as well - I guess it will probably be worth replicating from 64 to 32 to see what happens.


There are two paths that I can see to testing this:

1. Install CentOS 6 Minimal and try to add the equivalent 6 packages and see what is missing.

2. Install CentOS 6 Minimal and then try to add existing SME v8 (el5) packages

This how-to takes on route 1.

Bugs

Bug Tracker

Bugs that require immediate attention:

Considerations

  • 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
  • When you are using 64-bit, please add '--exlcude=*86' at the end of the yum command line. This will prevent i386/i686 packages to be installed as 'required' 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

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”

For the current purposes I decided to start manually each time so I that left the base settings as untouched as possible.

Enable SSH

On first run make sure we have ssh installed so we can use a terminal to login - much easier for copy and pasting stuff : 

yum install open-ssh*

To get to the sshd service you will need this on each boot : 

service iptables stop
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/menu.lst
sed -i -e 's/SELINUX=.*/SELINUX=disabled/g' /etc/sysconfig/selinux

Remove selinux-policy-targeted and authconfig

They conflict with some e-smith/smeserver packages 

yum remove selinux-policy-targeted authconfig

Configure basic requirements

Configure third party repo

Enable the EPEL repo 

rpm -Uvh http://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Enable the ATrpms repo 

rpm -Uvh http://dl.atrpms.net/el6-x86_64/atrpms/stable/atrpms-repo-6-6.el6.x86_64.rpm

Enable RPMForge 

rpm -Uvh http://pkgs.repoforge.org/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm

Configure SME repository (EL5 version for now) 

 cat<<'EOF' > /etc/yum.repos.d/sme.repo
 [smeaddons]
 enabled=1 
 mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.contribs.org/mirrorlist/smeaddons-8
 name=SME Server - addons
 gpgcheck=1
 enablegroups=1
 #
 [smecontribs]
 enabled=0
 mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.contribs.org/mirrorlist/smecontribs-8
 name=SME Server - contribs
 gpgcheck=1
 enablegroups=1
 #
 [smedev]
 enabled=0
 mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.contribs.org/mirrorlist/smedev-8
 name=SME Server - dev
 gpgcheck=1
 enablegroups=1
 #
 [smeextras]
 enabled=1
 mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.contribs.org/mirrorlist/smeextras-8
 name=SME Server - extras
 gpgcheck=1
 enablegroups=1
 #
 [smeos]
 enabled=1
 mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.contribs.org/mirrorlist/smeos-8
 name=SME Server - os
 gpgcheck=1
 enablegroups=1
 #
 [smetest]
 enabled=0
 mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.contribs.org/mirrorlist/smetest-8
 name=SME Server - test
 gpgcheck=1
 enablegroups=1
 #
 [smeupdates]
 enabled=1
 mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.contribs.org/mirrorlist/smeupdates-8
 name=SME Server - updates
 gpgcheck=1
 enablegroups=1
 #
 [smeupdates-testing]
 enabled=0
 mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.contribs.org/mirrorlist/smeupdates-testing-8
 name=SME Server - updates testing
 gpgcheck=1
 enablegroups=1
 #
 EOF

import SME's GPG key

rpm --import http://sme-mirror.firewall-services.com/releases/8/smeos/x86_64/RPM-GPG-KEY-SMEServer

install yum-plugin-priorities

yum install yum-plugin-priorities

Configure yum priorities

Set the base, updates and extras repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo a high priority (respectivly 50, 40, 50) 

 
[...]
[base]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Base 
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=os
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/os/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-6
priority=50

#released updates 
[updates]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Updates
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=updates
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/updates/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-6
priority=40

#additional packages that may be useful
[extras]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Extras
mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=extras
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/extras/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-6
priority=50

[...]

Set Epel to a priority of 60 in /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo

[epel]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/$basearch
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-6&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6
priority=60

Set RPMForge to a priority of 65 in /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo

[rpmforge]
name = RHEL $releasever - RPMforge.net - dag
baseurl = http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el6/en/$basearch/rpmforge 
mirrorlist = http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el6/en/mirrors-rpmforge
#mirrorlist = file:///etc/yum.repos.d/mirrors-rpmforge
enabled = 1
protect = 0
gpgkey = file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmforge-dag
gpgcheck = 1
priority=65

Set atrpms to priority of 70 in /etc/yum.repos.d/atrpms.repo

[atrpms]
name=Red Hat Enterprise Linux $releasever - $basearch - ATrpms
failovermethod=priority
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/el$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-atrpms
priority=70

Install some package without dependancy check

A few packages have to be installed manually without dependancy check: 

rpm -Uvh --nodeps http://sme-mirror.firewall-services.com/releases/8/smeupdates/x86_64/RPMS/smeserver-yum-2.2.0-20.el5.sme.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh --nodeps http://sme-mirror.firewall-services.com/releases/8/smeupdates/x86_64/RPMS/e-smith-samba-2.2.0-49.el5.sme.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh --nodeps http://sme-mirror.firewall-services.com/releases/8/smeos/x86_64/SME/e-smith-test-2.2.0-1.el5.sme.noarch.rpm

Two perl package need to be installed manually with sme and epel repo disabled (I need to figure out why repo priority doesn't fix this) 

yum install perl-Razor-Agent perl-Data-UUID --disablerepo=sme\* --disablerepo=epel

Install e-smith-base

Now, you should be ready to install e-smith-base. For me, this pulls 222 packages (166MB). For some reason, the GPGKey is not recognized, so just run yum with –nogpgcheck 

yum --nogpgcheck install e-smith-base

Install the remaining e-smith/smeserver packages

Now install all the remaining e-smith/smeserver packages 

yum --nogpgcheck install e-smith\* smeserver\*

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

Install samba

Now install samba-client (e-smith-samba has been installed manually without dep check, otherwise it would have pulled samba3x package instead of samba) 

yum install samba-client

Replace upstart with SysVinit

We've almost finished, we just have to replace upstart with the good old SysVinit, because upstart doesn't support the custom runlevel 7 SME uses 

rpm -e --nodeps upstart sysvinit-tools
rpm -Uvh http://sme-mirror.firewall-services.com/releases/8/smeos/x86_64/SME/SysVinit-2.86-17.el5.x86_64.rpm


Important.png Note:
Do we really need/want to replace upstart? This is an easy fix now to get COS 6 with e-smith/SME packages to to boot, but it differs from upstream COS, which we try really hard not to do.

Good question, where is the answer? Please post this to the devinfo mailing list so it can be decided on in this case


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/

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: 

/sbin/e-smith/db configuration set rsyslog service status enabled
cp -a /etc/rc7.d/S05syslog /etc/rc7.d/S05rsyslog

Run post-upgrade

We can now try to post-upgrade 

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

And reboot. Unfortunatly, I wasn't able to reboot properly at this stage, because of the upstart → SysVinit transition (the error message is ”/dev/initctl: No such file or directory”) so I had to destroy the VM completely

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
  • even if we manually add 0.0.0.0 after the ListenAddress line in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, we cannot connect using SSH (the daemon is running, but from a computer on the same network, I get a ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host error)
  • qpsmtpd won't start (can't locate Qpsmtpd/TcpServer.pm in @INC)
  • There's probably a lot more which is not working

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

I decided to attack perl first as the SME stuff is written in it.

Here is a list of perl files from v8 and their equivalent in CentOS 6 if available....

To get a list of the file names in v8 either do (all file starting with the string 'perl'): 

rpm -qa --qf '%{NAME}\n' name=perl\*

or as per suggestion on the lists (All files containing the string 'perl') 

rpm -qa | grep perl | sed -e 's/-[0-9].*//'

To get a alphabetically sorted list (which is easier to compare lists) add '|sort' to the commands above. 

rpm -qa --qf '%{NAME}\n' name=perl\*|sort
rpm -qa | grep perl | sed -e 's/-[0-9].*//'|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


Important.png Note:
Which command will be the de facto standard to use so we are all talking about the same list??


This is the output of the non-GREP variant: 

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.


Discussion, help and share

  • 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 here

Setting up a RPM Building environment under CentOS

Suggestions and notes from SME Developers

  • From Charlie on 1/21/2013:

You will need to modify a bunch of perl module rpms to use /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl instead of /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/. You'll also need to replace all the perl module rpms which are specific for perl 5.8.5 and 5.8.8 with ones which will work with RHEL6. Most of those will come from epel or rpmforge.

There's a little work to switch to rsyslog instead of syslog.

You'll need either a new whiptail rpm or new console.pm which uses only unmodified dialog.

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