SUSE Leap42.3 Configuration
SUSE Linux Installation is a couple of years out of date. Current plan has been a move to Leap42.3 so I need to document the new setup. The main problem being that while in the past we were able to use a fairly standard install, I need to roll back a number of areas to retain a working system.
Obviously the starting point is the current stable OpenSUSE distribution. For the server machines which will not have a graphic desktop, the network CD makes a better choice, and only running one graphic desktop, the same CD was used to create the base installation. The various attempts to upgrade to Leap in the past had failed, so starting from a clean install has been the prefered path. One problem with this is the new default file system is now btrfs. Having MISSED this on the first desktop machine install I found the major problem that btrfs creates! A crash on the machine caused a coruption in the file system and then prevented restating the machine. The hoops I had to jump through in order to recover a few files that had not yet been backed up will be another crib sheet, but neadless to say I'm not going to be using btrfs in the future. By sticking with EXT3 for data disks, a disk can simply be mounted on a new machine without any problem. The server machines have a number of trayless disk slots with up to 8Tb disks so data can be moved quickly if a machine goes down. btrfs does not allow this quick change just as other disk sharing methods. RAID systems have caused similar difficulties in the past, so storing the same data across two or more disks on different machines may be a more efficient and safe way of securing access to data. The Unofficial SUSE Users Guide has been updated to support Leap 42.3 now I just need to create a cribsheet for the various machine setups.
Server Machines
Text based installation with Nginx replacing Apache, PHP7, Firebird and MariaDB (only on legacy systems)
Desktop Machine
KDE4/Plasma5 graphics desktop