This week there is a range of small changes and nothing particularly major, here’s the details…

Default Python version

The default Python version on the DICE Ubuntu platform has been set to 3 for all machines. This means that anyone running the “python” command will automatically get Python 3. To use version 2 the “python2” command needs to be explicitly called. Previously this was only the case for machines which included the full DICE Python environment, i.e. desktop machines and user-accessible servers, it did not apply to small server configurations.

CUPS config

A default CUPS configuration has been provided for Ubuntu by the School of Physics. See bug#1266 for details. Note that the LCFG CUPS component is not used on most DICE machines so desktops and user-accessible servers are unaffected by this change.

MAC address validation

This week all profiles will switch to the new dhclient component schema (v4). This will restore validation of the MAC address held in the dhclient.mac resource to ensure it matches the expected format. This is something we had in the past which seems to have been lost during some development work. Recently we spotted that errors were creeping in which made the MAC addresses unusable, in particular ‘0‘ (zero) was occasionally being replaced with a ‘o‘ or ‘O‘ character. This is used to generate the DHCP server configuration files so ensuring the data is correct is quite important.

squid caching for packages

Work is ongoing on adding Debian support to the package cache service, this will eventually help reduce the load on the primary package server.

The LCFG rpmaccel component schema has gained support for squid refresh patterns. These can be used to control how long the data associated with particular URIs should be cached. The necessary changes to the squid template will appear in a subsequent release.

SL7 test Kernel

The INF_TEST kernel for SL7 has been updated to version 1160.15.2

Forum office machines in open areas

There is a new header – dice/options/office-forum-openarea.h – for office machines in the Informatics Forum which are located in an open area. Unlike the standard office header this blocks console access to everyone except the allocated user. Note that this header is specifically intended for allocated machines, public general access desktops should still be configured using the dice/options/public.h header.

Test updates

Support has been added to the DICE Ubuntu platform for holding back some or all of the weekly updates for extended testing. Typically this is used when minor releases occur (e.g. 22.04.2) which involve a larger number of updates with new features rather than just security fixes.

SL6 Support

For tidiness more of the old SL6 support headers have been removed.

Weekly Changes – 22/02/2021 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0