This week the main changes are a couple of improvements to support for Ubuntu for sites outside of Informatics. There was also a batch of tidying, new hardware headers for some server models and a few extra packages. Here are the full details…

Ubuntu installer

If packages must be fetched via a web cache during the install it can now be specified using the LCFG_INSTALL_PACKAGE_PROXY macro in the site header or at the beginning of an LCFG profile. Note that this has the effect of all files being fetched over the web going via the cache for the install process, including fetching LCFG profiles, so you may need to adjust apache ACLs appropriately. In particular, the profile.auth and associated profile.acl_$ resources for the installbase profiles may need to include the web cache server IP address. There is not normally any sensitive data in the installbase profile, it’s just used as a list of packages to be installed, so it should be fine to open it up to a whole domain for a site (e.g. inf.ed.ac.uk).

For DICE the Ubuntu installer will now always use the local web cache for fetching the first batch of packages from the upstream servers. Although only required for servers on our non-routed subnets it’s simpler to have it enabled everywhere, allows easier testing and should provide some a speed boost.

OpenAFS on Ubuntu

It is now easier to follow the latest version of the OpenAFS packages provided by Informatics by just specifying the ED_OPTIONS_OPENAFS_LATEST macro. Currently this means version 1.8.7 will be used, in preference to the 1.8.4 packages provided by Ubuntu.

devtoolset

On SL7 the devtoolset-10 is now available, this provides the Gnu Compiler Collection (gcc) version 10.2.1. This is available as an option on SL7.8 by defining the LCFG_SCL_DEVTOOLSET10 macro prior to including the lcfg/options/devtoolset.h header. On SL7.9 it will be installed by default.

Note that devtoolset-9 was never fully supported so, for clarity, the misleading resources have been removed from the header.

DICE Inventory

The clientreport script has been modified to apply a timeout to the spectre-meltdown-checker script which can occasionally take a very long time to run if the machine is busy. The overall timeout for the cron job has been increased to 2 minutes to allow most reports to complete successfully.

The script used to synchronise KVM guest information with the DICE inventory now uses a different Kerberos principal and keytab. This is to avoid reusing the hostclient principal for tasks other than it’s primary purpose.

Incorrect Resource Mutations

LCFG resources should only be prefixed with the ! (exclamation mark) when they are being mutated (e.g. with mADD, mSET, etc). This doesn’t usually cause problems but for clarity many instances have been tidied to remove the unnecessary mutation prefix.

Hardware headers

Various new headers have been added for Asus server models – lcfg/hw/asus_esc4000_g3.h, lcfg/hw/asus_esc4000_g4x.h, lcfg/hw/asus_esc8000_g4.h and also the Dell PowerEdge R740xd2 – lcfg/hw/dell_poweredge_r740xd2.h

New Software

Along with the weekly security updates some new software packages will be installed on DICE Ubuntu machines this week:

• pipenv – the officially recommended Python packaging tool from Python.org
• traceroute – Traces the route taken by packets over an IPv4/IPv6 network
• hyphen-en-gb/hyphen-en-us – Hyphenation packages for libreoffice

The hyphenation packages have also been added to the standard Ubuntu desktop packages list and the LCFG_OPTIONS_LIBREOFFICE option so any other site using those package lists will get the new packages installed.

A LCFG_OPTIONS_NETPBM option has been added for the netpbm graphics conversion tools and the LCFG_OPTIONS_XFIG option was tweaked to use it as a dependency. That option can be enabled by adding the option name to the profile.pkgcppopts resource, for example:

!profile.pkgcppopts mADD(LCFG_OPTIONS_NETPBM)

Weekly Changes – 31/05/2021 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0