SLES 11.1 Update questions

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SLES Updates
1

Hi! I’ve inherited a SLES 11 SP1 server with a strange repository setup (about 800 of the 1400 installed packages come from openSUSE 11.4 repositories, the rest being from assorted SLES repos, the situation is similar to what’s described in this thread). In its current state, the machine is kind of borked (all repositories are out of date) and I’ve got a couple of questions:

  1. What’s the best way for me to upgrade the machine to SLES 11 SP3? I really don’t want to break things, since this is a production machine. Further complicating matters, SLES runs virtualized on VMware.
  2. Are there any packages that are in the openSUSE-11.4-OSS repository that are not in the SLES repositories? That is, if I remove the openSUSE repos, would any packages not be updated at all anymore? Also, if yes, is there a way for me to check if there are any installed packages that would be impacted by removing a repository?

Here’s my ‘zypper repos -d’ output:
http://pastebin.com/U17ZFqBg

2

On 25/11/2014 13:04, GyrosOfWar wrote:
[color=blue]

Hi! I’ve inherited a SLES 11 SP1 server with a strange repository setup
(about 800 of the 1400 installed packages come from openSUSE 11.4
repositories, the rest being from assorted SLES repos, the situation is
similar to what’s described in ‘this’
(https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/498857-Emacs-suddenly-stopped-working-symbol-look-up-error/page2)
thread). In its current state, the machine is kind of borked (all
repositories are out of date) and I’ve got a couple of questions:

  1. What’s the best way for me to upgrade the machine to SLES 11 SP3? I
    really don’t want to break things, since this is a production machine.
    Further complicating matters, SLES runs virtualized on VMware.
  2. Are there any packages that are in the openSUSE-11.4-OSS repository
    that are not in the SLES repositories? That is, if I remove the openSUSE
    repos, would any packages not be updated at all anymore? Also, if yes,
    is there a way for me to check if there are any installed packages that
    would be impacted by removing a repository?

Here’s my ‘zypper repos -d’ output:
http://pastebin.com/U17ZFqBg[/color]

So to upgrade from SLES11 SP1 to SLES11 SP3 you need to upgrade to
SLES11 SP2.

However given then state of your server with the openSUSE 11.4 repo
available you first need to resolve the reason why that is and undo any
damage caused. Yes there are packages available for openSUSE 11.4 that
are not available for SLES11 so the first question is to identify if any
of those are installed on your server:

zypper se -ir OpenSUSE-11.4-OSS

This should return a list of packages installed from the
OpenSUSE-11.4-OSS repo. Hopefully it’ll return nothing but it sounds
like it’ll return something so let’s just hope the list is small.
Whatever it reports post the output here and we’ll go from there.

Can I also confirm that your server is SLES11 SP1 for VMware as that’s
what the last two repos suggest. Please post the output from both “cat
/etc/*release” and “rpm -qa *release”.

HTH.

Simon
SUSE Knowledge Partner

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3

Thanks for the quick reply. There’s a whole bunch of packages from OpenSUSE installed: http://pastebin.com/3eMxfaKW
I’m assuming a lot of those packages are available from the SLES repos as well, but I guess since both repos are at priority 99, the newer packages are installed, which are OpenSUSE.

Output from rpm -qa *release:
lsb-release-2.0-9.1
SLES-for-VMware-release-11.1-1.81

Output from cat /etc/*release:
LSB_VERSION=“core-2.0-noarch:core-3.2-noarch:core-4.0-noarch:core-2.0-x86_64:core-3.2-x86_64:core-4.0-x86_64”
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (x86_64)
VERSION = 11
PATCHLEVEL = 1