Weekly Changes – 08/02/2021

The changes for this week include an important fix which should help the LCFG client at boot time on SL7. Ceph users on SL7 will also be pleased to see the introduction of support for ignoring generated systemd unit files. Here’s the full summary…

Ubuntu Network Configuration

Work is continuing on improving the LCFG support for managing the network configuration on Ubuntu machines. The latest version of the LCFG network component – 2.2.1 – includes support for configuring VLAN interfaces, that is not yet the default but is available for testing. The changes for this week include preparatory work on the LCFG_NETWORK_ADD_VLAN macro which is typically used to simplify the process of adding new interfaces. Note that the macro API is unchanged which makes it particularly useful in the transition between SL7 and Ubuntu. A tweak was also made to the lcfg/options/etherbond.h header so that the default mode on Ubuntu is set to active-backup, you can change it via the LCFG_OPTIONS_ETHERBOND_MODE macro.

rpcbind and rdxprof

Since the starting of the rdxprof daemon was split out from the LCFG client component we have experienced problems with rpcbind stealing the UDP port that rdxprof uses to receive notifications from the LCFG server. To solve this problem we have changed the systemd configuration for rpcbind so that it waits for rdxprof to be started (and thus has to select a different port). Full details are in bug#1265. Note that this only applies to SL7, on Ubuntu rpcbind is started with different options which completely avoids the potential for the issue to occur. This was previously reported a couple of weeks ago, since then we have tested the change on a variety of machines, if you have important NFS services you may still wish to test this change yourself ahead of applying it to all your machines.

Systemd and unmanaged unit files

Typically with LCFG components we expect to manage the entire configuration but with systemd this is not always possible or desirable, in particular some unit files may be automatically created depending on the configuration of the machine (e.g. what disks it contains). The LCFG systemd component schema has been modified to add an ignoredunits resource, that takes a list of files to be ignored, simple globbing is supported.

This change was first applied to Ubuntu a few weeks ago, after discussion at the recent LCFG Deployers meeting we decided to introduce the same change for SL7. As this is a larger change on SL7 we are doing it in 2 stages, this week sees the schema updated, a subsequent release will include an update of the component code (0.10.2). If you are interested in testing this on SL7 the new version of the component package is available in the repository, reports of success/failure would be very much appreciated.

Matlab on Ubuntu

Support for Matlab version 2020b is now beginning to appear for Ubuntu. Talk to Graham Dutton for more details.

New Software

Along with the weekly security updates new support was added for the Lua programming language, note that not all machines will carry those software packages.