This week sees a couple of security improvements for the Ubuntu platform. Here are the full details…

sudo removed

The sudo application is not normally used on DICE machines so after the recent Baron Samedit vulnerability we have decided to remove it by default. On machines where it is required it can be added back by including the dice/options/sudo.h header or adding the LCFG_OPTIONS_SUDO macro to the profile.pkgcppopts resource. Note that generally on LCFG Ubuntu machines the sudo package is included by default as it is a dependency of the ubuntu-minimal package.

32bit updates on Ubuntu

Security updates are now applied automatically to any i386 packages which are installed on Ubuntu machines when the I386_PACKAGES is specified in the profile.pkgcppopts resource. This is enabled by default for DICE machines (but not generally on all LCFG profiles), so far this is only required on a very small number of DICE machines so for efficiency of processing profiles on the server we might switch to only enabling it where required.

Local Latex files

The local Informatics Latex files are now included on DICE Ubuntu desktops.

Test kernel

The INF_TEST kernel for Ubuntu Focal has been updated to 5.4.0-65.73

Lab machines in the Forum

Further tweaks were made to the dice/options/studentlabs.h header to make it easier to configure a Forum desktop machine to be like a student lab machine but with access limited to a specific individual.

Weekly Changes – 01/02/2021 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0