What's new in SLES SP3

Suse now support each previous service pack for six month since the next service pack was release. So For SLES 11, support of SP1 lasted for six month after SP2 was released (February 2012) and now it over. Actually SP2 was the first service pack released after Suse development was moved back to Germany and it was quite problematic at the beginning.

In any case after six month you need to upgrade to preserve support.

Some highlights of SLES SP3

Important changes:

• Sudo configuration changed.  They break compatibility with previous setup. Which is a bad thing, especially for Germans ;-)  If you use wheel group on SP3, for example:

  # Same thing without a password
  %wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

  you need to comment out  two lines:

  Defaults targetpw # ask for the password of the target user i.e. 

  root ALL ALL=(ALL) ALL # WARNING! Only use this together with 'Defaults targetpw'!

  in /etc/sudoers file.
   

• Installer changed but still bearable.  In their rush for changes they did not manage to completely destroy it yet ;-)
   
• Development Packages Moved to the SDK. As many development packages and sub-packages as possible have been moved to the SDK.  That was true in SP2 too.
• The default file system in new installations was changed from ReiserFS to ext3 with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11. This is true for all II service packs.

• Improved Update Stack

  SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 comes with an improved update stack and the command line tool zypper to manage the install/update packages and repositories.

  • Enhanced YaST Partitioner
  • Extended Built-in Management Infrastructure

   

Security

AppArmor

This release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ships with AppArmor. The AppArmor intrusion prevention framework builds a firewall around your applications by limiting the access to files, directories, and POSIX capabilities to the minimum required for normal operation. AppArmor protection can be enabled via the AppArmor control panel, located in YaST under Security and Users. For detailed information about using AppArmor, see the documentation in /usr/share/doc/packages/apparmor-docs.

The AppArmor profiles included with SUSE Linux have been developed with our best efforts to reproduce how most users use their software. The profiles provided work unmodified for many users, but some users find our profiles too restrictive for their environments.

If you discover that some of your applications do not function as you expected, you may need to use the AppArmor Update Profile Wizard in YaST (or use the aa-logprof(8) command line utility) to update your AppArmor profiles. Place all your profiles into learning mode with the following: aa-complain /etc/apparmor.d/*

When a program generates a high number of complaints, the system's performance is degraded. To mitigate this, we recommend periodically running the Update Profile Wizard (or aa-logprof(8)) to update your profiles, even if you choose to leave them in learning mode. This reduces the number of learning events logged to disk, which improves the performance of the system.

Fine-Tuning Firewall Settings

SuSEfirewall2 is enabled by default. That means that by default you cannot log in from remote systems. It also interferes with network browsing and multicast applications, such as SLP and Samba ("Network Neighborhood"). You can fine-tune the firewall settings using YaST.

Read-Only Root Filesystem

It is possible to run SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 on a read-only root filesystem. Due to the huge number of possible configurations, this is currently not a supported scenario.

The /tmp and /var directories need to be on a separate partition and cannot be mounted read-only.

After the installation has finished and all services are configured, login as root and do the following modifications:

Modify /etc/fstab and add "ro" to the mount options of the root filesystem entry.

rm /etc/mtab
ln -s /proc/mounts /etc/mtab
mkdir /var/lib/hwclock
mv /etc/adjtime /var/lib/hwclock
ln -s /var/lib/hwclock/adjtime /etc/adjtime
# the following two steps are only necessary if you use dhcp:
mv /etc/resolv.conf /var/lib/misc/
ln -s /var/lib/misc/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf
# Now mount root filesystem read-only and reboot
mount -o remount,ro /
reboot

Added System Security Services Daemon (sssd) for LDAP/Kerberos Authentication =The System Security Services Daemon (sssd) was added to SLE 11 SP2 to provide an alternative method to retrieve user and group information from LDAP directories and to perform authentication through LDAP or Kerberos. It is provided as an alternative to the nss_ldap and pam_ldap (or pam_krb5) Modules. Compared to those modules sssd offers some advantages:

• due to it's daemon based architecture possible symbol conflicts between different implementations of LDAP client libraries can be avoided
• offline authentication is supported (disabled by default)
• builtin support for Kerberos Authentication (no separate PAM module needed)

With SLE 11 SP2 the YaST2 ldap-client module can be used to setup sssd for LDAP (and/or Kerberos) Authentication. The YaST to ldap-client module can also be used to switch from a nss_ldap/pam_ldap based setup to sssd and back. Some additional notes:

• sssd requires a Transport Layer Encryption to be in place when using LDAP based authentication (e.g., LDAPS or StartTLS),
• sssd does currently only support the passwd, shadow and group NSS databases

Kernel and Toolchain

• GCC 4.3.4
• glibc 2.11
• Linux kernel 3.0.10

Other Changes and Version Updates

• EVMS2 Replaced with LVM2
• Default Filesystem

  A public statement can be found at http://www.suse.com/products/server/technical-information/#FileSystem.

• Samba 3.4.3
• UEFI Enablement on AMD64
• SWAP over NFS
• Python 2.6.0
• Perl 5.10
• Ruby 1.87

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

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Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

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The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

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Last modified: March 12, 2019