Hello everyone,
I’m a system manager for my company, and our primary server is a SLES 11 environment running on a Dell PowerEdge T310. I was recently tasked with installing and configuring an open-source firewall package called DansGuardian for our network environment, and somehow I ended up with a broken gnome/gdm environment that will not launch the desktop at boot and will not launch the X environment with startx. Also, changing from init 5 to init 3 and then re-initiating init 5 results in the same errors I encounter on boot.
I’m not super familiar with Red Hat or SUSE environments, but I’m a Linux hobbyist and I’m very familiar and comfortable in Ubuntu, shell or GUI. To the best of my ability, I will try to summarize what happened:
What Happened (IIRC):
- I began by following this guide from DansGuardian’s website: http://dansguardian.org/downloads/garylamprecht/The_Newbies_guide_to_installing_Suse_9.pdf
[INDENT][/INDENT]1.b. I got to the part where you have to ./configure the installation from source, and kept getting package errors when I would run make. - The first two errors I got were for autoconf and gcc, which installed fine from YaST.
- The third error I got was that the package could not be decompressed because zlib was missing. YaST wasn’t helping me any, so I searched around for an RPM to install, and found a SUSE listing for the package but nowhere to download. Eventually, I found this page: http://software.opensuse.org/package/zlib-devel
- Being the nimrod that I am, I followed the direct install link on ^ that page and installed the zlib library for openSUSE Leap 42.1. When I installed it, it added a repository and downloaded a number of dependency packages (including, I noticed, several related to gnome, without giving me much warning.) Nothing strange happened yet though.
- Running make again threw an error that libpcre was not found. I installed pcre from YaST, and that’s where things went south.
- In the middle of the pcre installation, I lost VNC connection and found that the server had force-rebooted itself, assuming from a crash.
Now, when the server boots, it loads all of the services until it gets to xdm, which fails. See my boot.msg contents below.
I noticed that the services that fail to boot are: nscd, xdm, nfs, and smbfs.
Things I’ve Tried:
So far, I’ve tried using this process to isolate and reinstall the RPMs related to the failed services: https://www.novell.com/support/kb/doc.php?id=7002802
However, that didn’t solve anything.
I’ve also tried following this thread: https://forums.suse.com/showthread.php?4323-SuSe-Enterprise-Server-11-will-not-load-to-the-desktop&p=20130#post20130 and got through all their troubleshooting steps successfully, including reconfiguring Xorg, but it ends without a final solution…
Logs and Other Information
Below are the contents of log files and RPM lists that I pulled. Hopefully they can be of some use…
boot.msg - http://paste.opensuse.org/73324199
rpm list - http://paste.opensuse.org/18993499
xorg log - http://paste.opensuse.org/58680656
xsession-errors log - http://paste.opensuse.org/25038272
[HR][/HR]
Thank you so much for your help!
Ted