Installing Suse Linux Enterprise 10 (SLES 10) with PERC 2/SC controller

I had a bit of an issue with the PERC 2/SC scsi controller on my dell power edge 2300/450 (Dell 440GX) where, during the installation of SLES 10, the installer refused to recognize my scsi controller and gave an (no hard disk found or something like that).

A bit of googling bought me to a place where a guy mentioned that you could change the emulation (under Objects, Host Adapter in the PERC configuration menu) from I20 to MASS HARDWARE. That I did and on rebooting, my system just froze and wont even proceed with the install. I then flashed the firmware for PERC 2/SC from 3.13 to the older 3.0 . Then proceeded with reboot and everything worked like a charm!

Unix/Linux Backup Strategies (Some useful links)

g4u - Harddisk Image cloning for PCs. Amazing little software and highly user friendly and very simplistic to use.
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

Dirvish, a very fast, disk based, rotating network backup system
http://www.dirvish.org/

Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with Linux and Rsync
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

Keith Lofstrom's disk-to-disk backup page (based on dirvish)
http://www.keithl.com/linuxbackup.html

Using Rsync and SSH (This document covers cron, ssh and rsync usage to backup files over a local network or the internet. By using
http://www.jdmz.net/ssh/

Cheap and reliable RAID 5 Network Attached Storage:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/27840/77/1/1/

Installing Zope on SLES 9

My attempt to install Zope and Python on Suse Linux Enterprise 9 met with several errors including conflicting versions of python (SLES did not support readline 5.* and Zope 2.9 demanded readline 4.*, irritating SAXReaderNotAvailable errors when forcefully installing rpm binaries meant for suse linux 10, etc.). I finally decided to install zope and python from scratch, from their latest source distributions. Upgrading existing version of python was not a feasible option for me on SLES 9, so I had to do a custom installation of pyton that will preexist with the existing version of python supported by novell's SLES 9. Below are the steps that I undertook:

Custom Source Installation of Python 2.4.2

- Downloaded the latest version of python which happened to be Python 2.4.2 at the time of this installation.

http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.4.2/Python-2.4.2.tgz

- Unzipped the source distribution to /home/software/Python-2.4.2 and executed the below steps to install python.

./configure --prefix=/opt/custom/python
make
make install exec_prefix=/opt/custom

All done there and thankfully no errors, and then I moved on to installing zope.

Source Installation of Zope

- Downloaded the latest version of Zope which was 2.9.0 at the time of this installation.

http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.9.0/Zope-2.9.0.tgz

- Unzipped them to /home/software and executed the below steps. Since I had two versions of python, one that is supported by SLES 9 (2.3.*) and the other being my above custom installation version (2.4.2), I had to specifically tell zope which one to use.

./configure --prefix=/opt/zope --with-python=/opt/custom/bin/python
make
make install

- Next came the process of creating a default zope instance and to set its default directory to '/opt/zope/default'.

/opt/zope/bin/mkzopeinstance.py

- Next, I tried to start the default zope instance by typing '/opt/zope/default/bin/zopectl start'. Zope failed to start, and gave me some error about 'daemon manager running; daemon process not running' or something like that. After trying to run zope again as a foreground process (fg option), it mentioned about needing to specify the default user the zope process should run as.

Opened up the zope.conf file in /opt/zope/default/etc/zope.conf and set the 'effective-user' directive to a local username 'nefertitian'. I tried 'root' but it gave me some other funny error that I dont remember about. Since the zope process would run as user 'nefertitian', I needed to give 'nefertitian' user read/write permissions to the var and log directories and making sure the stick bet is set (as mentioned in the documentation):

chown nefertitian:root /opt/zope/default/var
chown nefertitian:root /opt/zope/default/log
chmod o+t var

Tried to run zope again, and this time it worked like a charm!