SLES, you make it so hard to like you

Just wended my way through another SLES 10 install on s390x. It’s b0rked though, and I’ll probably have to redo it. I had some kind of I/O error during the install which seems to have resulted in a couple of the filesystems being remounted read-only. Not too much trouble you’d think…

Some things aren’t starting because of missing binaries in /usr, frustrating but probably recoverable. The network startup is totally clagged though, and I can’t even begin to work out how what happened… happened.

During bootup, at the time it tries to configure the network interface, I get streams of error messages about problems running the “ip” command. The error text is full of garbage that the init script is trying to parse as text configuration–it looks like a corrupted filesystem or a binary file.

I manually configured the network (not a trivial task in s390x, it must be said), and started to poke around. I got this when I logged in as root:

Last login: Sat Mar 15 12:48:36 2008
/usr/X11R6/bin/xauth: error while loading shared libraries: libXau.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
-bash: read: read error: 0: Is a directory
lxs0za01:~ #

Okay, so I won’t get funky X-based YaST.  No problem, I’ve spent more time in the ncurses-mode YaST anyway…

lxs0za01:~ # yast
warning: the ncurses frontend is installed but does not work
You need to install yast2-ncurses to use the YaST2 text mode interface
lxs0za01:~ #

WHAT!!! What the @#!$ happened there?!?!?

Okay, so I’ve calmed down about that, so I go looking for the problem with the network initialisation…

lxs0za01:~ # cd /etc/sysconfig/network
lxs0za01:/etc/sysconfig/network # ls -go ifcfg*
-rw-r–r– 1   141 2006-06-17 07:30 ifcfg-lo
lrwxrwxrwx 1    16 2008-03-15 02:23 ifcfg-qeth-bus-ccw-0.0.0f00 -> /lib64/ld-2.4.so
-rw-r–r– 1 27470 2006-06-17 07:30 ifcfg.template
lxs0za01:/etc/sysconfig/network #

Priceless. You can’t make this stuff up. I cannot for the life of me work out how this could possibly have happened. I guess I just blame it on a whacked-out filesystem and move along.

Okay, so both of these issues probably have extenuating circumstances unrelated to SLES or YaST… but it’s nice to have a vent now and then. I’ll write up something a bit fairer once I fix this b0rkedness. 🙂