A variety of changes for both the Ubuntu and SL7 platforms. In particular, please note the imminent big changes to network configuration for Ubuntu machines. Here’s a summary…

Network Configuration

The new LCFG network component – version 2.1.12 – is now ready to be used on the Ubuntu platform. In the next weekly release it will be enabled by default, in the meantime you can enable it by defining the LCFG_NETWORK_USE_NETPLAN macro at the top of an LCFG profile.

This is now using netplan to do the configuration work. The aim is that in most cases it will “just work” with the existing LCFG resources but occasionally tweaks will be required. The biggest nuisance is that the interface naming scheme has changed again, on SL7 where you had em1, em2, etc you are now likely to have eno1, eno2, etc.. The default will work for most desktops but servers are harder to predict when they may have additional network cards, VMs also have different interface names but hopefully the default will work for most people.

Any changes will not be applied until the next reboot, we recommend doing om network configure and verifying the contents of the /etc/hosts file and the /etc/netplan directory before rebooting.

Note that this only supports simple configurations for desktops and bonding for servers. In the near future we will look into adding support for VLANs and bridging.

apparmor

The apparmor service will be disabled on DICE machines at the next reboot because it has been causing many peculiar problems with (at least) OpenAFS, libreoffice, evince and the reading of man pages.

SL7 Kernel

The supported kernel for DICE machines (the INF kernel option in the ed/options/kernel-el7.h header) has been updated to the 1160.2.2 series. Those machines using the autoreboot component will be automatically rebooted some time within the next week, that affects all SL7 desktops in Informatics and selected servers.

OpenAFS on SL7

The default version of OpenAFS in ed/options/openafs.h on SL7 is now 1.8.6. That will not have any effect on DICE machines where we hardwire the versions for each minor release in the dice/options/openafs.h header.

PostgreSQL updates

PostgreSQL databases were upgraded to the latest versions, see the postgresql announcement for full details.

Ubuntu Hardware Support

Ubuntu is now supported by LCFG on the HP Elite 8200 and 8300 desktop models along with the Dell PowerEdge R620 server.

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:

• sshfs – filesystem client based on SSH File Transfer Protocol
• exfat-utils – utilities to create, check, label and dump exFAT filesystems
• R packages – a variety of R packages from CRAN

Weekly Changes – 23/11/2020 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0