I’ve been playing with omsa on debian etch for a bit (dell 1955 blades) and wanted to post the notes on here. I’ve been using the sara.nl packages. After install, you’ve gotta start the daemon up: ‘/etc/init.d/dsm_om_connsvc start’.

Then you login as root/yourrootpassword. I’ve seen docs somewhere, I forget, that any user in /etc/passwd can login and those that are in the root group are admins. But it doesn’t work. If you check out /var/log/user.log you’ll see pam errors.

For some awesome reason when googling the dell list server archives you always get hits on the monthly gz digests but not the individual messages. I saw a few about this but I’m not going to dig them all back up, but this is good.

Basically you need 32bit versions of the following files and to put them in /lib32:

/lib/libsepol.so.1
/lib/libselinux.so.1
/lib/security/pam_unix.so
/lib/security/pam_nologin.so

You can figure out what package each file comes from with ‘dpkg -S file’, ie, ‘dpkg -S /lib/security/pam_unix.so’ which comes from libpam-modules. Its worth noting this package comes from the PAM master package so it it’ll be in pool/main/p/pam in the repo rather than pool/main/libp or whatever. Grab the i386 version of each package (libsepol1, libselinux1, libpam-modules) and extract them with dpkg -x package temp, then go into the temp tree (cd temp/lib) and copy the respective files to /lib32. I just copied the whole security folder from libpam-modules by the way. I used ‘dpkg -l | grep package’ to find out what version of each package was installed, then grabbed the same version in i386.

Run ‘ldconfig’ then tail /var/log/user.log just to keep an eye on things, and you should be able to log in now.

update: it’s worth linking that the sara.nl folks have revealed an wiki site with many of these answers here.