After much digging around I found the directives that needed to be put into the
apache2 configuration. All of the documentation from Novell indicates
that this is supposed to get done by YaST when configuring the YOU server, but
it doesn't. For reasons unknown, even in a situation where apache2 was
removed and /etc/apache2 and /etc/sysconfig/apache2 were manually deleted after
apache uninstall, the YOU server setup did install apache2 but did not
configure it to expose the YOU server patch path.
So, to solve that problem, I put this set of directives into httpd.conf.local
which is brought in by a statement /etc/apache/sysconfig/apache2:
<IfDefine you_server>
Alias /YOU "/var/lib/YaST2/you/mnt"
<Directory "/var/lib/YaST2/you/mnt">
Options FollowSymLinks Indexes
IndexOptions +NameWidth=*
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</IfDefine>
Because of the IfDefine, It also says to create the variable 'you_server' in
/etc/sysconfig/apache2. This was already in place as follows:
APACHE_SERVER_FLAGS=" you_server" -
I got this information from a whitepaper document from Novell Consulting called
'Deploying SUSE Linux in the data Center'.
I also started slpd, and verified through the SLP browser in YaST under network
services that the YOU server was registering via SLP. It was.
Once /etc/sysconfig/online update was changed to have SLP_ENABLED set to 'yes',
the local YOU server shows up.
So I change the Installation source to point to my SLP exposed YOU server and
result looks like:
┌Update Configuration──────────────────────┐
│ Installation source │
│ {server} YOU Serv>┴ │
│ Location │
│ http://{server}.{mgmt obfuscation}/YOU▒▒▒ │
│ [New Server...][Edit Server...] │
│ [x] Manually Select Patches │
│ [ ] Reload All Patches from Server │
│ │
│ [Configure Fully Automatic Update...] │
└──────────────────────────────────────────┘
When I try to use it is the point of confusion because the attempt to connect
to it returns:
┌──────────────────────────────────┐
│error HTTP return code: 404 ─
│(URL: │
│http://{server}.{mgt obfuscation} │
│us/YOU/<HTML><HEAD> │
│<TITLE>Novell/s390x/update/SUSE │
│-SLES/9/patches/directory.3) ─
└──────────────────────────────────┘
The web server target exposes three directories. These directories were created
by the synchronization from Novell and did not exist prior to that.
Index of /YOU
Name Last modified Size Description
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Novell/ 27-Nov-2006 09:25 -
media.1/ 28-Nov-2006 09:13 -
s390x/ 27-Nov-2006 09:19 -
So obviously it's trying to chose directory <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Novell instead
of s390x What I need to figure out now, is WHY it is doing it.
Curiously, when I go into a clean YaST session and point it at
http://{server}.{mgmt obfuscation}/YOU/s390x/ it gives this error:
┌──────────────────────────────────┐
│error HTTP return code: 404 ─
│(URL: │
│http://{server}.{mgt obfuscation}.│
│us/YOU/s390x/s390x/update/SUSE- │
│CORE/9/patches/directory.3) ─
└──────────────────────────────────┘
And then when I change it BACK to http://{server}.{mgmt obfuscation}/YOU/ then
it successfully retrieves the patches. While this gets around the
issue, it doesn't solve it. It is not persistent across iterations of YaST.
┌───────────────────────────────────────────┐
│Retrieving information about new updates...│
│ 14% │
│ [Abort] │
└───────────────────────────────────────────┘
I verified that there is a Directory structure <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Novell in
/var/lib/YaST2/you/mnt and it contains more subdirectories strangeness
with directories that look like HTML tags for names. I won't make this overlong
message logger by showing a recursive exposure of them, but it is
quite strange.
If anyone has any idea on how I might fix this, I'd be very grateful.
-J
