March 2008 Archives

IPv6 vs IPX

In a session last week came the following comment from a presenter (paraphrased):
How may of you in the room have been at this long enough to do IPX? Ok, great. Now how many of you have done anything with IPv6? Doesn't that look JUST like IPX?
And he's right, to a point. IPX addresses are of the form network-number:node-number, such as:

00008021:0002a540d0e1

Where 'node number' is the MAC address of the network card in question. It's up to the routers to figure out where network-numbers live, and advertised services issue full-network broadcasts to advertise said service, which is the primary reason that IPX just doesn't scale if WAN links are in the mix. But that's by the by.

IPv6 addresses work similarly:

2001:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7334

The last 48 bits are the MAC address and the bits ahead of it constitute the network number. Except... the IPv6 designers knew about the failings of IPX and worked around them. The last 48 bits don't have to be the MAC address, though as I understand it that address has to exist for each physical interface. Unlike IPX, IPv6 has the ability to have 'secondary' addresses. The lack of this ability was the main reason that Novell Cluster Services only worked on IP networks, which caused its own wave of grief when clustering was introduced in the NetWare 5.1 era. Secondary IPv6 numbers don't have to follow the MAC format, which in my opinion is a good thing!

Yes, when I first read about IPv6 addressing I had that same, "wow, this is just like IPX," moment the BrainShare presenter had. Only, more scalable, and more flexible.

BrainShare Thursday

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Not a good day. My first course, "Advanced BASH," could more accurately be described as, "BASH scripting tips & tricks". I then proceeded to skip the other three sessions I had signed up for.
  • Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 Interoperability with Windows and AD. All about Domain Services for Windows and Samba. Neither of which we'll ever use. No idea why I wanted to be in this session.
  • Rapid Deployment of ZENworks Configuration Management. Other people around here have suggested that if we haven't moved yet, wait until at least SP3 before moving. If then. So, demotivated. Plus I was rather tired.
  • Configuring Samba on OES2. CIFS will do what we need, I don't need Samba. Don't need this one. Skipped.
DL236: Advanced BASH Course
BASH tips and tricks. I got a lot out of it, but the developers around me were quietly derisive.

ZEN Overview and Features
Not so much with the futures, but it did explain Novell's overall ZEN strategy. It isn't a coincidence that most of Novell's recent purchases have been for ZEN products.

TUT303: OES2 Clusters, from beginning to extremes
This was great. They had a full demo rig, and they showed quite a bit in it. Including using Novell Cluster Services to migrate Xen VM's around. They STRONGLY recommended using AutoYast to set up your cluster nodes to ensure they are simply identical except for the bits you explicitly want different (hostname, IP). And also something else I've heard before, you want one LUN for each NSS Pool. Really. Plus, the presenters were rather funny. A nice cap for the day.

And tonight, Meet the Experts!

BrainShare Wednesday

The Wednesday keynote was, indeed, a bunch of demos. It was also mostly pointless as far as the technology I'm concerned with. Lots of GroupWise (don't care), lots and lots of PlateSpin (can't afford it), lots of Zen (not the bits I'd use).

That said, the new GroupWise WebAccess is gorgeous. I wish Exchange had their non-ActiveX pages look that good.

TUT175: RBAC: Avoiding the horror, getting past the hype
Mostly about IDM as it turned out. Only minimally interesting from an abstract viewpoint about roles in general.

TUT 277: Advanced eDirectory Configuration, new features, and tuning for performance
I learned a few things I didn't know, such as the fact that each object as an "AncestorList" attribute listing who their parent objects are. This apparently greatly speeds up searching. SP3, coming out this Summer, will have faster LDAP binds for a couple of reasons. Right now Novell is recommending 2 million objects as a reasonable maximum size for a partition for performance reasons.

And also they reiterated something I've heard before...
You know how back in the NetWare 4 days, we said to design your tree by geography at the first level, and then get to departments? Um, sorry about that. It was great back then, but for LDAP or IDM it really, really slows things down.
Yep. I took my first class for my CNA when 'Green River' was just coming out, or was just out. So I remember that.

TUT221: iPrint on Linux, what Novell Support wants you to know
A nice session from a mainline support guy about the ways people don't do iPrint on linux correctly. We're not going there until pcounter can run in linux, so this is still somewhat abstract. But, nice to know.
  • The reason that some print jobs render differently than direct-print jobs, is because of how Windows is designed. Direct-print jobs render with the 'local print provider', and iPrint jobs render with the 'network print provider'. This is a Microsoft thing, not an iPrint thing. You can duplicate it by setting up a microsoft IPP printer (assuming you're not mandating SSL like we are) and printing to the same printer with the same driver.
  • The Manager on Linux doesn't use a Broker, it uses a 'driver store'.
  • The Manager on NetWare doesn't always bind to the same broker. I didn't know that.
  • It is recommended to have only one Broker, or one driver store per tree.
  • Novell recommends using DNS rather than IP for your printer-agents, check your manager load scripts.

BrainShare Tuesday

Today started off with a bit of panic, as I hadn't set my alarm. Me being a west-coaster, 7:20 (when I woke up) is an entirely reasonable time to get up as far as my body is concerned. Only, I needed to get dressed and breakfasted before my first session at 8:30. Aie! I had to eat quick, but I got there. Didn't get a chance to check work email, though.

ATT326: Advanced Linux Troubleshooting
An ATT, therefore hard to summarize. But I learned about a few new commands I didn't know about before. Like strace. And vimdiff.

TUT130: Challenges in Storage I/O in Virtualization
Another nice one, but an emergency at work (printing down in a dorm, during finals week) distracted me heavily during the first half of it. Which resulted in the following note in my notes:
NPIV looks really nifty. Look into it.
NPIV being how you can use fibre-channel zoning to zone off VM's, rather than HBA's. Highly useful. I also learned about a neat new thing called Virtual Fabrics. Virtual Fabrics work kind of like VLANS for fabrics. You can segregate your fabrics into fabrics that share hardware but nothing else. Handy if your, say, Solaris admins don't want you mucking about with their zoning, while saving money through consolidated hardware.

TUT216: OES2 SP1 Architectural Overview
There is a LOT of new stuff in SP1.
  • It will include eDir 8.8.4 (8.8.3 will ship this summer sometime)
  • NCP and eDir will be fully 64-bit
  • OES2 SP1 will be based on SLES SP2, which will be releasing about the same time
  • AFP Support
    • AFP 3.1
    • Uses Diffie-Helman 1 for password exchange, meaning the 8-character password problem is solved.
    • Fully SMP-safe
    • Has cross-protocol locking with NCP. CIFS doesn't have cross-protocol locking yet, but IIRC, Samba does
    • Does not need LUM enabled users
  • CIFS Support
    • NTLMv1, but v2 is a possibility if enough people ask, so file those enhancement requests!!
    • CIFS is separate from Samba, therefore can not be used in conjunction with Domain Services for Windows
    • As with AFP, fully SMP safe
  • EDir 8.8.4
    • LDAP auditing enhanced
    • "newer auth protocols", but they didn't say what.
I should also mention that they're still deploying Novell Integrated Samba, which is what you'll have to use to get Domain Services For Windows. Samba still doesn't scale as far as I'd like ('only' 700-800 concurrent users), so that may be an issue for higher ed types who want high concurrency CIFS and also DSFW on the same box.

TUT211: Enhanced Protocol Support in OES2 SP1
This is the session where they went into detail about the AFP and CIFS support. They said that netatalk, the existing AFP stack on Linux, gets really slow once you go over the 20 concurrent users. Whoa! I can soooo understand why Novell felt the need to make a new one.
  • The 8 character password limit has been fixed! They now support DH1 for passing passwords.
  • The 'afptcp' daemon can use one password protocol at a time, so you can only use DH1, or one of the other three I can't remember.
  • Support for OSX 10.1 and 10.2 is scanty, and 10.5 is limited but users may not notice anyway.
  • Passwords will be case sensitive.
  • Kerberos will be in a future release
  • Performance is faster than NetWare, partly due to the ability to multi-thread
  • Can register services by way of SLP
  • Only supports NSS for the time being, the other Linux file-systems will be a future feature.
  • Can support 500 concurrent users, and 1000+ in the future. This fits our current AFP loads.
  • We can configure more about how it works than we could on NetWare, such as how many worker threads to spawn.
  • Has meaninful debug logs!
  • Has a new command, 'afpstat' that works like 'netstat' for giving a snapshot of afp connections.
And then some CIFS stuff. We can't use it for political reasons so I didn't pay attention. Sorry.

Tonight was the night formerly known as 'Sponsor Night,' but has a new name now that everyone who gets a booth is no longer a 'sponsor'. Some are sponsors, some are exhibiters. I can't keep track. Anyway, today was their party. "World of Novellcraft!" Homage to vid-gaming.

Lots of Wii, lots of Rock Band, some Halo, lots of women dressed in Renaissance Festival gear getting their pictures taken by the 90%+ male audience. I've blogged before about my ambivalence about Sponsor Night. I lasted until about 7, when I came back to the hotel.

Tomorrow I have an actual LUNCH BREAK in my schedule! Ooo! And Soul Asylum Soul Coughing Collective Soul plays the concert! I've been listening to two of their CD's for the past two months so I think I may even know a few songs by now.

Today at Brainshare

Monday. Opening day. I had trouble getting to sleep last night due to a poor choice of bed-time reading (don't read action, don't read action, don't read action). And had to get up at 6am body time in order to get breakfast before the morning keynote. There be zombies.

Breakfast was uninspired. As per usual, the hashbrowns had cooled to a gellid mass before I found everything and got a seat.

The Monday keynotes are always the CxO talks about strategy and where we're going. Today a mess of press releases from Novell give a good idea what the talks were about. Hovsepian was first, of course, and was actually funny. He gave some interesting tid-bits of knowledge.
  • Novell's group of partners is growing, adding a couple hundred new ones since last year. This shows the Novell 'ecosystem' is strong.
  • 8700 new customers last year
  • Novell press mentions are now only 5% negative.
Jeff Jaffe came on to give the big wow-wow speech about Novell's "Fossa" project, which I'm too lazy to link to right now. The big concern is agility. He also identified several "megatrends" in the industry:
  • High Capacity Computing
  • Policy Engines
  • Orchestration
  • Convergence
  • Mobility
I'm not sure what 'Convergence' is, but the others I can take a stab at. Note the lack of 'virtualization' in this list. That's soooo 2007. The big problem is now managing the virtualization, thus Orchestration. And Policy Engines.

Another thing he mentioned several times in association with Fossa and agility, is mergers and acquisitions. This is not something us Higher Ed types ever have to deal with, but it is an area in .COM land that requires a certain amount of IT agility to accommodate successfully. He mentioned this several times, which suggests that this strategy is aimed squarely at for-profit industry.

Also, SAP has apparently selected SLES as their primary platform for the SMB products.

Pat Hume from SAP also spoke. But as we're on Banner, and it'll take a sub-megaton nuclear strike to get us off of it, I didn't pay attention and used the time to send some emails.

Oh, and Honeywell? They're here because they have hardware that works with IDM. That way the same ID you use for your desktop login can be tied to the RFID card in your pocket that gets you into the datacenter. Spiffy.

ATT375 Advanced Tips & Tricks for Troubleshooting eDir 8.8
A nice session. Hard to summarize. That said, they needed more time as the Laptops with VMWare weren't fast enough for us to get through many of the exercises. They also showed us some nifty iMonitor tricks. And where the high-yield shoot-your-foot-off weapons are kept.

BUS202 Migrating a NetWare Cluster to OES2
Not a good session. The presenter had a short slide deck, and didn't really present anything new to me other than areas where other people have made major mistakes. And to PLAN on having one of the linux migrations go all lost-data on you. He recommended SAN snapshots. It shortly digressed into "Migrating a NetWare Cluster to Linux HA", which is a different session all together. So I left.

TUT215 Integrating Macintosh with Novell
A very good session. The CIO of Novell Canada was presenting it, and he is a skilled speaker. Apparently Novell has written a new AFP stack from scratch for OES2 Sp1, since NETATALK is comparatively dog slow. And, it seems, the AFP stack is currently out performing the NCP stack on OES2 SP1. Whoa! Also, the Banzai GroupWise client for Mac is apparently gorgeous. He also spent quite a long time (18 minutes) on the Kanaka client from Condrey Consulting. The guy who wrote that client was in the back of the room and answered some questions.

Brainshare Sponsors

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In order to keep costs to us walking sales leads down, Novell solicits sponsors for BrainShare to help subsidize the whole event. There is nothing wrong with that, it means a lot of potential freebies for the people who are good at saying No politely ;).

So I'm offering this list of companies who have booths at BrainShare, what Novell product they're primarily interested in, and how it relates to me. The PDF I'm sucking this off of is this one of the Sponsor Hall.

  • SAP. The 'Cornerstone Sponsor'. I think everyone who reads my blog knows what they do. At a guess, their primary interest is in Identity Manager. SCT Banner is the ERP for the .EDU space, so we don't use 'em.
  • IBM. From last year, it's clear this is their Hardware division. So their primary interest is in SLES. We're on a different hardware platform, but... it's hardware. I'll still drop by to look at the pretty.
  • GWAVA. They make message filtering software for GroupWise. If you need anti-spam/virus for your GW installation, you're probably running GWAVA. We don't use GroupWise, so they have nothing I need.
  • GroupLink HelpDesk. A Helpdesk product that appears to be cross-platform. Their product is probably Linux, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that they still have a lot of NetWare hiding back there. We use Magic Helpdesk for that function.
  • Microsoft. You know who they are. Officially their product is SLES but... who knows what they'll bring. We use a LOT of them around here, what with being an Exchange deployment and owning 96% of the desktops.
  • Messaging Architects. They are a more general email security and archiving provider. Their product is GroupWise, but they also sell some appliances that I could theoretically use in front of our Exchange servers. We've settled on a product from a much bigger vendor for that function, but still.
  • Novacoast IT. A consulting firm specializing in Novell. Their products are a wide gamut of Novell stuff, SLES, ZEN, IDM, and GroupWise. We're a poor .EDU, and can't afford consultants.
  • Honeywell. Honeywell is kind of like GE and IBM, they do a little of everything. I don't know what their Novell tie-in is.
  • Syncsort. They were one of the first backup products to fully support OES1. They are arguably the backup software that supports Novell stuff the best. Their products are SLES, OES, and NetWare. We looked at them when we were looking for a new backup vendor, but they didn't quite measure up for various reasons. I just might drop by.
  • Omni. Another consulting firm that specializes in Novell products, but they also have some discrete products. Their web-site says they do SLES, OES, NetWare, GroupWise, and NetMail (now a Messaging Architects product). We're a poor .EDU, and can't afford consultants.
  • HP. They do hardware. Their booth isn't as big as it was last year, so there will be less pretty to look at. Their product is SLES/OES. They're our hardware vendor, so I'll be talking real good with these folks.
  • Condrey Corporation. Another consulting company specializing in Novell products. They do IDM, Novell Storage Manager, NetWare, and probably OES/SLES. Poor .edu, can't afford 'em. yadda yadda. Also, we built our own IDM stuff so don't need no steeenkin other stuff.
And a bunch more vendors in smaller booths. Some big names (Blackberry), some not so big (idEngines).

There are exceedingly few (two, really) vendors there that can expect to see any of WWU's money any time soon. Nor is that at all likely to change. Our user head-count (21,000+) and FTE count (13,000+) combine to mean that anything that charges per-user is going to be out of our price-range pretty quickly, or will be subjected to a bidding process. We build our own solutions to problems a lot of the time because of this.

Which means that I'm a very poor sales lead.

It also means I feel a bit guilty trading my contact info for Shiny! during Vendor Night since those vendors are sooo going to strike out when they call me in April.

New novell.com web site

Novell just updated their web-site.

As in, updated in the last 12 hours or so, so expect some broken links for a while.

Another thing I noticed is a very slight rendering difference between Linux and Windows.

Top left of Novell.com, from Linux
The page as rendered in SeaMoneky from Linux

Top left of Novell.com, from Opera
The page as rendered in Opera from Linux

Top left of Novell.com, from WinXP
The page as rendered in SeaMonkey from WinXP


It's a very simple lay-out thing, but it does indent the page that much. I kinda like it.

What I don't like is that the front page is very flash-heavy. I've had issues with flash on x86-64 machines, so I'm a bit burned by it. That said, I do realize that flash is about as prevalent as the ability to render .PNG files so it's a valid web technology.

More HP annoyances

They've recently revised their alert emails to be even more badly formatted. The below slug of text contains a critical alert. Somewhere.


Your alerts
Document: Customer Advisory; Link:
http://alerts.hp.com/r?2.1.3KT.2ZR.xl4lg.C0m3Bi..T.DSeQ.1Lki.DKEbf000 Priority:
Critical; Products: All-in-One Storage Systems,Disk-to-disk Backup,HP Integrity
Entry-level Servers,HP Integrity High-end Servers,HP Integrity Mid-range Servers;
OS: not applicable; Release Date: Feb 26 2008; Description: Advisory: (Revision)
FIRMWARE UPGRADE or WORKAROUND REQUIRED to Prevent Rare Scenario of Potential
Logical Drive Failure on HP Smart Array Controller Attached to Multiple Drive
Arrays if Drive Failure or Incorrect Drive Replacement Occurs After Power Loss
(c01232270) Document: Customer Advisory; Link:
http://alerts.hp.com/r?2.1.3KT.2ZR.xl4lg.C0m3Bi..T.DTgW.1Lki.ccEcI000 Priority:
Recommended; Products: HP ProLiant BL Server Blades,HP ProLiant DL Servers,HP
ProLiant ML Servers,MSA Disk Arrays,Server Controllers; OS: not applicable; Release
Date: Feb 28 2008; Description: Advisory: FIRMWARE UPGRADE RECOMMENDED for Certain
HP Smart Array Controllers to Avoid False SAS and SATA Hard Drive (c01382041)
Document: Customer Advisory; Link:
http://alerts.hp.com/r?2.1.3KT.2ZR.xl4lg.C0m3Bi..T.DTf8.1Lki.DeBcEbI0 Priority:
Routine; Products: HP ProLiant BL Server Blades,HP ProLiant DL Servers,HP ProLiant
ML Servers,HP ProLiant Packaged Cluster Servers,Server/Storage Infrastructure
Management Software; OS: not applicable; Release Date: Feb 20 2008; Description:
Advisory: HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM) Running in an Environment with a
Large Number of WBEM Managed Nodes May Experience Task Page Interface Slowdown or
Out of Memory Errors (c01371984) Document: Customer Advisory; Link:
http://alerts.hp.com/r?2.1.3KT.2ZR.xl4lg.C0m3Bi..T.DTgo.1Lki.DAMEdA00 Priority:
Routine; Products: HP ProLiant BL Server Blades,Server Management Software; OS: not
applicable; Release Date: Feb 28 2008; Description: Advisory: Virtual Connect
Enterprise Manager (VCEM) 1.0 May Not Be Able To Add Virtual Connect (VC) Domains
to a Virtual Connect Domain Group After Updating the VC Domain Group on a ProLiant
Server (c01382035) Document: Customer Advisory; Link:
http://alerts.hp.com/r?2.1.3KT.2ZR.xl4lg.C0m3Bi..T.DTgi.1Lki.CPQEca00 Priority:
Routine; Products: HP ProLiant BL Server Blades,HP ProLiant DL Servers,HP ProLiant
Packaged Cluster Servers; OS: not applicable; Release Date: Feb 28 2008;
Description: Advisory: ProLiant Essentials Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) Displays
Incorrect VMM Warning Message on FireFox Browser for ActiveX Controls (c01382044)
Document: Customer Advisory; Link:
http://alerts.hp.com/r?2.1.3KT.2ZR.xl4lg.C0m3Bi..T.DTgQ.1Lki.MAEcC000 Priority:
Routine; Products: HP ProLiant BL Server Blades,HP ProLiant DL Servers,HP ProLiant
ML Servers,HP ProLiant Packaged Cluster Servers; OS: not applicable; Release Date:
Feb 28 2008; Description: Advisory: (c01382042) Document: Customer Advisory;
Link: http://alerts.hp.com/r?2.1.3KT.2ZR.xl4lg.C0m3Bi..T.DTgg.1Lki.CJcEcY00
Priority: Routine; Products: HP ProLiant DL Servers,HP ProLiant ML Servers,HP
ProLiant Packaged Cluster Servers,Server Network Interface Cards; OS: not
applicable; Release Date: Feb 28 2008; Description: Advisory: Novell NetWare
Teaming Driver (QASM.LAN) May Fail to Load After Upgrading to ProLiant Support Pack
for Novell NetWare 7.80 (or later) (c01382039) Document: Customer Advisory; Link:
http://alerts.hp.com/r?2.1.3KT.2ZR.xl4lg.C0m3Bi..T.DTgU.1Lki.XIEcG000 Priority:
Routine; Products: All-in-One Storage Systems,HP Integrity Entry-level Servers,HP
Integrity High-end Servers,HP Integrity Mid-range Servers,HP ProLiant BL Server
Blades; OS: not applicable; Release Date: Feb 28 2008; Description: Advisory:
(Revision) HP ProLiant Smart Array SAS/SATA Event Notification Service Version
6.4.0.xx Does Not Log All Events to the Windows Registry (c01177411) Document:
Customer Advisory; Link:
http://alerts.hp.com/r?2.1.3KT.2ZR.xl4lg.C0m3Bi..T.DTgk.1Lki.CVEEcc00 Priority:
Routine; Products: HP ProLiant BL Server Blades,HP ProLiant DL Servers,HP ProLiant
ML Servers,HP ProLiant Packaged Cluster Servers,ProLiant Essentials Software; OS:
not applicable; Release Date: Feb 28 2008; Description: Advisory: SmartStart
Scripting Toolkit Reboot Utility May Not Respond Or May Display a Segmentation
Fault Error On a ProLiant Server Running SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 10 Service
Pack 1 (SP1) (c01382031) Document: Customer Notice; Link:
http://alerts.hp.com/r?2.1.3KT.2ZR.xl4lg.C0m3Bi..T.DTh2.1Lki.DdWYEbE0 Priority:
Routine; Products: HP ProLiant BL Server Blades,HP ProLiant DL Servers,HP ProLiant
ML Servers; OS: not applicable; Release Date: Feb 28 2008; Description: Notice:
Linux System Health Application and Insight Management Agents (hpasm),
Lights-Out-Driver and Agents (hprsm), and NIC Agents (cmanic) Are Now Delivered as
a Single rpm Package for all Supported HP ProLiant Linux Servers (c01382040)
Document: Customer Advisory; Link:
http://alerts.hp.com/r?2.1.3KT.2ZR.xl4lg.C0m3Bi..T.DU7I.1Lki.DbNQEaL0 Priority:
Routine; Products: HP ProLiant BL Server Blades,HP ProLiant DL Servers,HP ProLiant
ML Servers,HP ProLiant Packaged Cluster Servers; OS: not applicable; Release Date:
Feb 28 2008; Description: Advisory: Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 3.1 May Cause a
(c01383032)


This is a plain-text email, no HTML->Plain formatting weirdness. It COMES this glommed together. Time to send a cranky-gram.

Flash on openSUSE 10.3

For the past few months the flash plugin hasn't been working for me. I didn't miss it much since I have a WinXP VM up all the time and it can play them, just not sound. I hadn't been using it much since the nspluginwrapper processes had a tendency to hang once in a while and consume 100% single-thread CPU. Annoying that. As I use the 'flashblock' plugin, it didn't bite me hard I just didn't click on flash unless I really wanted to view it. Since like 80% of non-text ads are now delivered as flash, this has greatly reduced the advertising I have to sit through and fly-ins like CNN is now doing are transparent.

But. No sound for my YouTube! So, I had to fix that.

Right now I'm running openSUSE 10.3, and using Seamonkey as my primary browser (though Firefox was broken for flash too). It took me close to two hours to figure out what the heck went wrong and how to fix it.

Everything I found said I should run the following command to just make it work:

nspluginwrapper -v -i /usr/lib/browser-plugins/libflashplayer.so

Except I kept getting this error:

nspluginwrapper: no appropriate viewer found for ./libflashplayer.so

What ultimately ended up fixing it is the following series of commands:

As root:
  1. zypper rm nspluginwrapper nspluginwrapper-i386. This removed the existing nspluginwrapper install, which I suspect was borked.
  2. zypper in nspluginwrapper nspluginwrapper-i386. This installed both packages. Both packages ARE required for this to work on x86-64 machines. Remember, nspluginwrapper allows you to run 32-bit plugins in a 64-bit browser, so it has to cross the boundaries.
As my primary user:
  1. nspluginwrapper -v -i /usr/lib/browser-plugins/libflashplayer.so This gave the following output:
    1. Install plugin /usr/lib/browser-plugins/libflashplayer.so
      into /home/[user]/.mozilla/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so
Also of note, the resulting binary, npwrapper.libflashplayer.so, is about 90% larger than the old binary it replaced. I know that nspluginwrapper has had some updates since openSUSE 10.3 came out, and I suspect that a lot has changed. So I have high hopes that perhaps the hanging-plugin problem will go away. We shall see.

Also of note, I believe that running the nspluginwrapper -v -i process may have to be done every time nspluginwrapper gets updated. But, it would seem I have to explicitly upgrade it so remembering to do it shouldn't be an issue.