Weekly changes – 02/11/2020
This week has been a fairly busy one which sees us continuing to enhance the new Ubuntu 20.04 platform. There is a wide variety of changes touching on network, systemd, nvidia graphics, mail clients and the usual software updates. Here’s a summary…
Ubuntu Kernel
The Informatics test kernel for Ubuntu has been updated to 5.4.0-52.57, that can be enabled by specifying the ED_OPTIONS_KERNEL_INF_TEST option before including the ed/options/kernel.h. Once testing is complete this will become the new stable kernel, that is expected to happen by the end of November 2020.
alpine Mail Client
The alpine mail client on Ubuntu has been updated to a locally-built version 2.24, replacing the upstream 2.22. The new version provides support for IMAP authentication using OAUTH2. At some point that will become essential for accessing mail in Office 365, Informatics computing staff are curently testing that support.
nvidia Graphics Driver
The default nvidia graphics driver for both SL7 and Ubuntu has been updated to the 450 series. There are also minor updates for the legacy 340 and 390 series drivers on SL7.
Network Configuration
Work continues on providing support for managing the network configuration on Ubuntu machines using the LCFG network component. Currently, there is now support for simple DHCP and static addresses, as would normally be used for workstations, and also for bonding interfaces which is needed for servers. The associated nagios monitoring script for bonding status now also works. In the future we will look into adding support for VLANs and bridging. The changes to the network schema are being kept to a minimum with the aim that wherever possible existing LCFG resource configurations from SL7 should “just work” with the new component. There will be extensive testing before the new network component is enabled by default, in the meantime you can use it by enabling the LCFG_NETWORK_USE_NETPLAN option at the beginning of an LCFG profile.
Systemd Configuration
The LCFG systemd component will now be run during the Ubuntu install process. This guarantees that the systemd configuration is in a sensible state before the first reboot. This is important because post-install scripts will typically enable services whether we want them or not. This means we can choose to mask selected services at install time to ensure they are never automatically started.
The systemd component has also been tweaked to not enable services which do not exist. It may be that the service will exist once the installer has completed the second stage but enabling a service before it exists has been causing trouble with running apteryx at boot time which led to installs hanging.
A number of services (including autofs, openssh, lldpd and xrdp) have had tweaks to the systemd configuration to remove the possibility of locking up the boot process if they are upgraded using apteryx at boot time. Previously those services were configured to not start until after the lcfg-multi-user-stable.target target, that is only reached when certain services have been started, including the package manager apteryx. If any of those services were upgraded at boot time the post-install script would request a restart which would wait on the already scheduled start which would wait on the stable target which would wait on apteryx, etc… This is a change in behaviour in systemd since SL7 where this approach continues to work well. More services will need to be reconfigured and it seems that the lcfg-multi-user-stable.target target can only now be used with extreme care. There often are good reasons to leave the starting of a service until very late, maybe to avoid having users login too soon via openssh or maybe to avoid starting a heavy service when the machine could be going for another immediate reboot to finish off a kernel upgrade. We are considering introducing a new late target which can be used for that purpose but would be implemented in a different way by including it in the requirements list for the default target.
Changing the systemd configuration for xrdp revealed it was missing some important entries for network-online.target and nss-user-lookup.target in the After list, notably these are standard in the SL7 package. Also we were not starting the service in the correct way, there are 2 related services – xrdp.service and xrdp-sesman.service – we were starting the session manager when it should all be done via the main xrdp service.
Support for HP Z1 G5
Support for the HP Z1 G5 tower workstation has been added. This didn’t require anything special and was mostly based on the existing HP EliteDesk G5 header. The model was tested with an nvme SSD for the primary disk and an nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card. We noted that audio only works on monitors with internal speakers when using an hdmi cable, when using a displayport cable it did not work.
DICE software changes
Along with the weekly security updates, the following packages were newly installed on DICE Ubuntu. Note that not all machines will carry all these packages:
- offlineimap – tool for reading locally stored email
- maildir-utils – set of utilities to deal with Maildirs
- zsh – shell with lots of features
- mu4e and vm
- powershell – Microsoft automation and configuration platform
- scons – replacement for make build tool
- swig – compiler that makes it easy to integrate C and C++ code with other languages
- libopenmpi-dev – development support for openmpi
- gpustat – pretty status viewer for GPUs
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