This document is created by Alejandro Forero Cuervo to document certain problems he experiences with SLES along with their solutions, in the hope that they may serve others use SLES more effectively.
Missing software
No package for Subversion
Incredibly, the increasingly ubiquitous and necessary package Subversion is not provided as part of SLES9. I strongly depend on Subversion for most of my administration needs.
I recommend you build Subversion from source. In order to do this, you need to install packages gcc and libapr (and you probably want to install openssl-devel, after which you'll want to pass the –with-ssl option to Subversion's configure script); in this case you'll be able to use Subversion with fsfs repositories, which might be acceptable in your case (assuming the server where you store your repositories runs another distribution or you prefer fsfs over BDB).
No package for Keepalived
Sadly, SLES does not include Keepalived, only heartbeat.
To build keepalived, install the following packages:
- popt-devel
- openssl-devel
- gcc
- make
- kernel-source, if you want IPVS (LVS) support.
Do check the output of Keepalived's configure script, specially the last lines.
Poorly packaged software
libapr includes a lot
The header files for the Apache Portable Runtime library are included in the libapr package. As a consequence, if you want to install the library (only the shared object), you are also forced to install the C header files, which only very few installations will actually need.
Consequence: libapr, in SLES, requires 1.9 MB of space, whereas in Debian a more recent version (thus probably bigger) only requires 0.4 MB (with libapr-dev requiring 1.4MB) on the same architecture.
Solution: Evidently, Novell should split libapr into two separate packages, libapr and libapr-dev.
No /etc/init.d/freshclam script
The ClamAV package does not include an /etc/init.d/freshclam script, so you are forced to run it using a cron job (instead of being given both options).
If one really needs to run it as a daemon, one could use the /etc/init.d/freshclam script from another distribution, such as Debian's. I might add more details as to how to do this soon.
Last update: 2005-10-20 (Rev 4529)