Colors of Noise

The current state of multipath support in Debian Installer's RC2 for Lenny is documented here. The netinst works fine if you use the patched grub (#442382). Unfortunately the CD images are currently broken due to missing libaio udeb.

The easiest way to get the patched grub into your system is via http://tinyurl.com/mpgrub/inst_i386.sh as described in the README.

The recently updated multipath-tools 0.4.8-14 support disks >2TB and also work with kernels more recent then Debian's 2.6.26.

New upstream versions of virtinst and virt-manager are available via Debian's experimental distribution. All the bugfixes we carried as patches have been applied upstream by Cole Robinson, which is great. New features include disk- and newtork-I/O graphs and direct support for installing paravirtualized Debian Lenny Xen Guests via:

   virt-install -n xenfoo1 -r 96 --disk path=/path/to/file,device=disk,size=1 --location=http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/testing

I finally merged the krb5-auth-dialog patches discussed here into it's gnome svn home and we released 0.8.

Only the DBus interface is still missing since I'd like to rework this first. Other things on the TODO list are a config dialog and a dialog to see all current tickets in the cache.

There are packages available for Debian and Fedora already.

The details on howto add GSSAPI/Kerberos to your Linux SAP server are nicely explained here (German). The only annoyance is that one has to hand edit the sources for the SNC adaptor. Therefore I've pushed an already patched tree (as desribed in the above document) here:

git clone http://honk.sigxcpu.org/git/sncadapt.git/

To build the source simply do a:

cd sncadapt 
make

And to "install" the resulting shared object copy to the location you specified for snc/gssapi_lib, e.g.:

cp snckrb5.so /usr/local/lib64/

The document also assumes you're using AD, so creating the principal for the server and extracting it's keytab takes several steps. If you're using e.g. Heimdal you can simply do a:

ktutil -k sapsrv.keytab get SAPService/sapsrv.example.com@EXAMPLE.COM

and copy the resulting file from your KDC to your server.

Enabling Kerberos in the sapgui for Java on Linux:

• This assumes you already have Kerberos working on the machine you run the sapgui on.

• Install the SAP GUI for Java. If you use a Debian based distribution, you can use the sapgui-package for that.

• Install a kerberos GSSAPI library, if not already there. On Debian you can e.g. use libkrb53.

• Before starting the sapgui tell it to use that library for for SNC:

  export SNC_LIB=/usr/lib/libgssapi_krb5.so.2
  

• Append these parameters to the connect string you use to connect to your SAP server:

  &sncname="p/krb5:SAPService/sapsrv.example.com@EXAMPLE.COM"&sncon=true&sncqop=9
  

  Substitue sapsrv.example.com with the SAP server. This server must have SNC via GSSAPI/Kerberos enabled. Replace EXMAPLE.COM with your Kerberos realm. More details on these parameters can be found in the manual.

• Connect either via guilogon or guistart while having a valid Kerberos ticket.

There's another nice description at duke.edu.

While Debian's Iceweasel ships a nice search engine for Debian packages it doesn't have one for the bug tracking system (which I tend to use more frequently). So I stitched together a simple search engine following the Opensearch specificaton. To install it in Firefox/Iceweasel go here.

sapgui-package allows you to build a Debian package out of the SAP GUI for Java by simply running:

make-sgpkg PlatinGUI-Linux-710r7.jar

You can then install the resulting Debian package via:

dpkg -i sapgui_7.10rev7_i386.deb

The 'guistart' and 'guilogon' binaries are available as 'sapguistart' and 'sapguilogon' in your path.

Once a new release comes out simply repeat the above steps and all users on your system(s) will enjoy the new version. This has been tested with 7.10r6 and 7.10r7.

The source code is available via:

git clone http://honk.sigxcpu.org/git/sapgui-package.git/

An ITP has already been filed.