OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

[Posted April 20, 2007 by corbet]

From:		Andreas Jaeger <aj-AT-suse.de>
To:		opensuse-factory-AT-opensuse.org
Subject:		Announcement: Software management for openSUSE
Date:		Wed, 18 Apr 2007 15:17:33 +0200


openSUSE is focusing on native software management by using YaST and
libzypp, the package management library.

ZENworks Linux Management is Novell's solution for enterprise-class
resource management for desktops and servers. ZENworks components are
fully available and supported for SUSE Linux Enterprise based products
and not longer part of the openSUSE distribution.

Product development for both ZENworks and SUSE Linux Enterprise
concentrates on continued interoperability solutions for remote and
local software management.

Andreas
-- 
 Andreas Jaeger, aj@suse.de, http://www.suse.de/~aj/
  SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg)
   Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
    GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F  FED1 389A 563C C272 A126

to post comments

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 20, 2007 21:37 UTC (Fri) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link] (21 responses)

Very good!

It's insane to have this kind of software written in MS .Net wizwaz.
(as Zen* is. )

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 20, 2007 21:56 UTC (Fri) by macc (guest, #510) [Link] (16 responses)

in SuSE 10.2 there was lots of shit eating resources
and phoning home. nearly half the machine taken for
running in idle.
zmd, beagle, apparmor, firefox... kde and their various automatics.
even Yast and the config stuff is more cryptic with
every release.

I feel forced to move elsewhere.

G!
MACC

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 20, 2007 23:25 UTC (Fri) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link]

Perhaps you need to maybe glance at the article?

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 21, 2007 1:51 UTC (Sat) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link]

The only thing you have to do is select the openSUSE software management pattern and unselect the enterprise software management pattern on installation, or afterwards. This gets you rid of the resource eating zmd and stuff. You can do the same with Apparmor and deselect the beagle package.
Another good way is to set mono to taboo.

Yast will get better again in the next version(s). The new package management library is a large change and has to be brought up again to the old standards. But it's a good change: having multiple repositories is already far better than before and having patches managed by the same system is a very nice thing, too.

Just give them a little time.

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 21, 2007 8:33 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (13 responses)

AppArmor phones home? AppArmor consumes detectable memory or CPU time?

I sort of doubt it. (You have the source: look at it. Oops, look, it
doesn't phone home.)

(I'm just trying to figure out what on earth AppArmor would phone home
about. `Hey, this guy just tried to run an application requiring
CAP_NET_ADMIN!' I'm sure that would simply *fascinate* everyone.)

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 21, 2007 9:19 UTC (Sat) by macc (guest, #510) [Link] (12 responses)

I have used SuSE for a long time to run
a remote solar radio telescope.
The system manages some antennae and
receivers with embedded RT-linux.
all send their data to the central server/management cosole
the data is merged, compacted, stored nightly and a quickview is
pulled from the site on regular intervals.
All hangs on an (expensive) ISDN dialup

zend/zmd and beagle eat memory like mad and cpu resources to boot.

apparmor broke some instrumentation stuff i use.

firefox phones home. ( actually to some google site
in a repeating pattern. keep the ISDN line up)

moving forward through all the various SuSE
versions starting with 6.3 was never such a
hassel as with this last step to 10.2.
The problem I see is that it has developed into a field of
personal mines.

G!
MACC

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 21, 2007 21:29 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

firefox contacts google for the google search bar. you can disable this (I think it's even in the menu options so you don't need to go to about::config)

I'd be interested in hearing how AppArmor broke your instramentation package. as I understand AA it only affects things that it's configured for, if it didn't know about your software it shouldn't have affected it.

Firefox phishing filter

Posted Apr 22, 2007 0:07 UTC (Sun) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (10 responses)

What Firefox is doing is downloading a blacklist from Google for its phishing filter. Try disabling the phishing filter and it should stop downloading.

Firefox phishing filter

Posted Apr 22, 2007 8:39 UTC (Sun) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (9 responses)

This is actually a common problem with many Linux/Open Source apps: They have forgotten about the concept of dialup links. (And increasingly on Windows, the MS security update itself likes to download stuff over gprs unless it is switched to manual.) There are things that should work like this when on a network with enough bandwidth, but that should know to yield when on a dialup or slow or costly link.

Is there even a good way on Linux to check whether you are on dialup on Linux? As I understand it, in the above example Firefox just opens network sockets and the ISDN dialup software runs to serve the request and open a network connection. There should be a way to say: "I'd like to connect to google servers the next time network is up (for some other reason)."

Firefox phishing filter

Posted Apr 22, 2007 12:53 UTC (Sun) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

It's not possible to reliably detect a dialup/costly link, or even if the link is up, since it could be elsewhere (for instance, on a router). One solution I recall looking at long ago (back when I still used dialup) is diald; with it, you could specify which packets would bring up the link (for instance, you could make UDP packets to port 123 (ntp) never bring up the link, nor be counted as using the link for the purpose of disconnecting it due to inactivity).

profiles?

Posted Apr 22, 2007 21:30 UTC (Sun) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (7 responses)

Is there even a good way on Linux to check whether you are on dialup on Linux?

Or even conveniently bring up different sets of services at boot time? Eg. you would get a menu with entries like "broadband", "dialup", "a place where I have a fixed IP address N.N.N.N", "no network at all" etc. before init runs, and each could be made to start up different sets of things. (This obviously is useful only on systems normally booted with a user in attendance, like desktops and laptops).

The SysV init runlevels do not handle this, because they are rather hierarchical (level N assumes services started at level N-1 are running). In this case it is not a question of network vs no network, but different kinds of network.

I guess what I want isn't very hard to implement in principle, but it would probably be very distribution-dependent. I wonder if there is existing software like this?

already done

Posted Apr 23, 2007 5:57 UTC (Mon) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (2 responses)

Ironically the scolded SUSE is exactly the distribution that already has a system like you describe: the System Configuration Profile Management.

"SCPM enables your system to save different configurations in profiles. You can boot directly into a profile as well as switch profiles at run time. It is the successor of scheme management."

already done

Posted Apr 23, 2007 8:29 UTC (Mon) by macc (guest, #510) [Link] (1 responses)

Right, and I use SCPM for mobile stuff role based changes and
to switch between my home and my customers networks
for newly installed boxes or those that are in for repair/update.

My critique was about having expensive ( resourcewise ) software
installed and running by default ( and only an absolute minority
of users having any real use for that.)

YaST currently is too splintered to give access to switching
these features in a meaningfull way.

Forex adding some timesource via serial line breaks _silently_
on apparmor rules for ntpd. ( had some Talk, fixed )

The answers to my original post are up to slahdot level.

MACC

already done

Posted Apr 23, 2007 20:11 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

I respectfully submit that you may wish to reexamine your original post then. The folks who responded do generally give useful and constructive replies.

profiles?

Posted Apr 23, 2007 12:23 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, the boot manager could pass a command line to the kernel, which would be ignored by the kernel, but the init scripts could read it from the /proc/cmdline and could do different things depending on this parameter... Our local IT staff uses a (very limited) solution like this, so the laptops have "network" and "standalone" menu items in lilo.

Bye,NAR

Kernel command line usage

Posted Apr 24, 2007 5:54 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

Interesting! I always thought the kernel command line is available only for passing options to the kernel itself. But how can I make sure that any extra 'profile' options placed on the command line are not intercepted by the kernel (not now, nor in the future when new kernel options are added)?

Kernel command line usage

Posted Apr 24, 2007 22:11 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

You, um, can't. A number of things (notably arch-dependent things) get
involved even before the initramfs runs, and can consume args as they
wish. (Adding extra arguments is *very* useful for initramfses and
initrds; arguments to mount root filesystems in unusual ways, to run
emergency repair shells just before or just after mounting root, and,
well, to trigger anything else you can think of).

However, it's quite unlikely that a random argument you pick will
name-clash, and if it does you can always rename it.

profiles?

Posted Apr 24, 2007 18:52 UTC (Tue) by JoeF (guest, #4486) [Link]

I use different lilo "append=" options on my Slackware bootup on my laptop. I modified the rc.* files to change things like network settings according to the option I select.

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 20, 2007 21:56 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (3 responses)

Yeah, absolutely insane to use an ECMA-standardized VM and large swathes of completely NON Microsoft Free Software APIs and libraries written on that VM when you can instead do it in C/C++ (except it'll take you 5 times as long) or in Python (except the VM changes ABI every release, plus its slow) or in Java (which is the same thing as Mono/.NET, except with s/Microsoft/Sun/).

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 20, 2007 22:36 UTC (Fri) by zorgan (guest, #4016) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't care about ECMA or VM or C/C++ or whatever acronyms you want to
mention. What I care about is that on my openSUSE laptop, I regularly had
a very sluggish system due to beagled and the zend running. This was
really a horrible decision from a user's point of view.

P.S.: Anyone knows the cleanest way to shut off beagle entirely?

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 21, 2007 4:07 UTC (Sat) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (1 responses)

The cleanest way:

rpm -qa | grep mono | xargs rpm -e beagle tomboy

This was tested on Fedora, maybe SuSE has more dependencies.

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 22, 2007 1:55 UTC (Sun) by hanwen (subscriber, #4329) [Link]

yum remove tomboy beagle

should also work and is less hackish

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 21, 2007 5:34 UTC (Sat) by mbottrell (guest, #43008) [Link] (4 responses)

I gave up on OpenSuSE at 10.1.... 10.0 ran perfectly, and 10.1 was a dog....

I've moved on... running Ubuntu now and haven't looked back.

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 21, 2007 12:09 UTC (Sat) by althetechie (guest, #5353) [Link]

+1 (kubuntu)

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 21, 2007 14:42 UTC (Sat) by dh (subscriber, #153) [Link]

10.1 was almost unusable. I stayed with 10.0, switched to 10.2, and -
again - I am a very happy user of SuSE Linux. It works even better once
you know how to shut off ZMD...

Regards, Dirk

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 21, 2007 15:57 UTC (Sat) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link] (1 responses)

I moved to using suse full time at version 9.1, after years of redhat use. I agree 10.1 was pretty messy, but 10.2 is a nice comeback, since you no longer need the whole zmd thing. I also routinely remove beagle and friends, and the result is a smooth running box, on the desktop, laptop or in the server room.

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 22, 2007 8:35 UTC (Sun) by eknuds (guest, #44328) [Link]

I switched away from Redhat at about the same time. Even the pay version of RH workstation 3 was buggy.
I've been happy with my switch to SuSE, and, more recently, my switch to OpenSuSE. I'm running 10.1 commercial on my laptop and the update nastiness kind of got on my nerves. Otherwise, it's still decent. The 10.2 release seems to work pretty well. I like how up to date most of the packages are.

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 21, 2007 19:57 UTC (Sat) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link]

outstanding idea. I have cursed the hanging zenworks often enough (and was too lazy to do anything about it). Now if only that dang beagle vanished from the default choices, too ...

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 23, 2007 1:57 UTC (Mon) by jimmybgood (guest, #26142) [Link] (1 responses)

What kind of license does zenworks have? Has anyone seen a EULA? I got nothing but phone numbers at novell.com.

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 23, 2007 6:02 UTC (Mon) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link]

zmd - Novell ZENworks Linux Management daemon
Version: 7.1.100.0-46 Size: 1.0 M Media No.: 1
License: GNU Library General Public License v. 2.0 and 2.1 (LGPL)

rug - Command Line Client for zmd
Version: 7.1.100.0-34 Size: 285.6 K Media No.: 1
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

OpenSUSE to drop ZENworks

Posted Apr 23, 2007 18:04 UTC (Mon) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

Brilliant. However, this idea should have come up before 10.1.