How to install GOsa on RHEL/CentOS 5

As you can read on GOsa website: “GOsa² provides a powerful GPL’ed framework for managing accounts and systems in LDAP databases. Using GOsa² allows system administrators to easily manage users and groups…”. The installation on Red Hat Enterprise Linux/CentOS is a bit tricky and here you will find how to install it.

First you need to set SELinux in permissive mode (if you have enabled it) and configure the firewall to let other systems to connect to port 80/443 (HTTP and HTTPs) and 389 (LDAP server port) using the commandline tool

# system-config-securitylevel-tui

Now we need to get some more RPM repos to work:

//First the CentOS testing repo
# cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
# wget http://dev.centos.org/centos/5/CentOS-Testing.repo
//Then the RPMForge repo
# rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/rpmforge/RPMS//rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
//And last the GOsa RPM repo
# cat >> GOsa.repo << EOF
> [GOsa-Repository]
> name=GOsa Repository
> baseurl=ftp://oss.gonicus.de/pub/gosa/redhat
> enabled=0
> gpgcheck=0
> EOF

As we want the system as stable as possible without many packages from externarl repositories please verify that the files CentOS-Testing.repo and rpmforge.repo both contain the line ‘enabled=0‘. Now let’s check the new repositories for new packages to install and install them:

# yum –enablerepo=rpmforge,GOsa-Repository,c5-testing check-update
//Install LDAP
# yum install openldap openldap-servers
//Install PHP 5.2 from CentOS Testing
# yum –enablerepo=c5-testing install php-common php-imap php-snmp php-mysql php-mbstring php-pdo
//Install perl-Crypt-SmbHash from RPMForge
# yum –enablerepo=rpmforge install perl-Crypt-SmbHash
//Install GOsa RPMs
# yum –enablerepo=GOsa-Repository install gosa-help-en.noarch gosa-plugin-addressbook.noarch gosa-plugin-ldapmanager.noarch gosa-plugin-mail.noarch gosa-plugin-rolemanagement.noarch gosa-plugin-systems.noarch gosa-schema.noarch gosa-plugin-goto

Now we need to be sure that Apache HTTPD and LDAP servers start at boot:

# chkconfig httpd on
# chkconfig ldap on

At this point, before configuring GOsa, you need to add specific GOsa schemas to your ldap using as reference a part of the beginning of my own /etc/openldap/slapd.conf

include         /etc/openldap/schema/core.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/cosine.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/inetorgperson.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/gosa/rfc2307bis.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/gosa/gofax.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/gosa/gofon.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/gosa/samba.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/gosa/gosystem.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/gosa/goto.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/gosa/samba3.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/gosa/gosa-samba3.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/gosa/goserver.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/gosa/goto-mime.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/gosa/trust.schema

Restart your openldap and finally we can connect to GOsa web interface and configure it pointing your browser at

http://<hostname>/gosa/

Now you should have a fully functional GOsa install on your CentOS5: please let me know if you found error in this tutorial or even if you found it useful.