NSS on the same device as the root file system on OES 11.

  • 7010300
  • 25-Jun-2012
  • 26-Jun-2012

Environment

Novell Open Enterprise Server 11 (OES 11) Linux
Novell Open Enterprise Server 11 (OES 11) Linux Support Pack 1

Situation

Purpose:
Add NSS Pools to the disk that holds the linux system partitions (ie. root and swap).

Resolution

During installation of SLES 11 SP1 you need to keep unpartitioned space available for NSS.  This can be either a primary partition or in an extended partition.

For example if you have a 30 GB disk, during installation you would only partition
1.5 GB for swap
20 GB for /  (ext3)

Then do nothing with the rest of the disk.  After the installation of OES 11 you can then use "nssmu" to create a pool on the remaining disk space (8.5 GB).  NSSMU will take care of the partitioning for you as you create the pools and volumes.

Additionally if you choose to use LVM on the system disk you will need to leave unpartitioned space for NSS.  (you can not add a NSS pool inside of an LVM volume group).

Additional Information

In OES 11 you need to limit the number of partitions (primary + extended) to 15 on the device that holds the system disk.  This is because each time you expand a NSS pool on this disk it will create a new partition.  Going over 15 is not recommended (as seen in "fdisk -l /dev/sda".

OES 11 SP1 has hard limits set so going over the number of partitions is now caught by the code.