Environment
Novell
ZENworks 7 Linux Management - ZLM7
Novell SUSE
Linux Enterprise Desktop 10
Novell SUSE
Linux Enterprise Server 10
SLE 10 managed
device subscribed to ZLM 7 or ZLM 7 DE server. The server has
mirrored updates from updates.novell.com for SLE 10 devices.
However, the server does not contain the base packages for SLE
10.
Situation
Doing a rug
up on the managed device causes dependency resolution to report
that several packages need to be removed due to failing
dependencies, where they should not. One specific example is where
the package aaa_base is reported to be removed because there are no
providers for the file /usr/bin/cmp, even though /usr/bin/cmp is'implicitly' provided by an updated package,
diffutils.
Resolution
ZLM does not
support a scenario where it is used purely for upgrades. Therefore,
one must upload the entire packages that are part of the SLE 10
distribution into ZLM along with the upgrades. This would cause ZLM
to calculate the dependencies correctly and make them available to
the client. See KB 3339684 for detailed instructions on how
to do that.
Additional Information
When a
package is added to the ZLM server, say via mirroring, it creates a
metadata file (bundle.xml) which the client will download. This
metadata file contains information such as the capabilities that
the package provides. In creating this information, ZLM merges the
explicit and implicit capabilities that are provided by the
package. Implicit capabilities include the file list defined in a
package, such as /usr/bin/cmp provided by diffutils. In order to
reduce the amount of information to store on the server and also
reduce the amount of metadata information that would require to be
downloaded to the client, ZLM stores only those implicit
capabilities that are required by other packages on the server.
Traditionally, this design met the needs of most customer
environments, as the ZLM server had both the base packages and
updates.