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LCFG Project

LCFG Project

Recent Activity for the LCFG project

Weekly Changes – 21/06/2021

This week sees a veritable smorgasbord of changes. For DICE the changes have a fairly low impact. External sites using Ubuntu will probably want to pay close attention to the postfix mail server changes. Here are the full details…

SL7.9

Testing of SL7.9 support for the DICE platform is now complete. It can be tested on specific machines by defining the DICE_TRY_SL79 macro at the top of an LCFG profile. This is expected to become the default for machines following the develop release on Tuesday 29th June.

postfix

The configuration for the postfix mail server used for DICE Ubuntu machines has been transferred to the LCFG header. This has no impact on DICE machines, it should mean that postfix “just works” for most external sites when they use the default Ubuntu configuration. Sites which have previously created their own local configuration are likely to need to make some changes to remove conflicts for duplicated resource definitions.

MariaDB

Configuration for managing MariaDB using the LCFG component has been contributed by Barry O’Rourke, see bug#1272 for full details. The Ubuntu platform is fully supported, for SL7 just the minimum configuration is currently provided. This means that just including the lcfg/options/mariadb.h header in an LCFG profile should be sufficient for most sites to get it working. The component schema is now also included as standard.

Network

There has been further work on improving the network component for Ubuntu. New support for configuring bridge devices is currently being tested and should hopefully appear soon.

clientreport

The DICE clientreport has gained support for reporting more useful system status information:

  • Core dump files for root
  • LCFG components which want a reboot
  • Intel “Active Management Technology” (AMT) status – uses mei-amt-check
  • Kernel module loading – is this disabled for security reasons?

Kernel

The SL7 INF_TEST kernel (for both 7.8 and 7.9) has been updated to 3.10.0-1160.31.1.el7

LVM

A first attempt has been made to add support for Ubuntu to the lvm component, in particular, there is a new template that generates a reasonable configuration file.

Initial testing of the LVM component on Ubuntu suggests that it is not safe for use. As we already use LVM for managing the disk partitioning on the Ubuntu platform and the component is unaware of that configuration there is currently a high risk of it completely removing all logical volumes and volume groups.

Virtualisation

A range of new package options have been introduced to improve support for KVM virtualisation on Ubuntu:

  • LCFG_OPTIONS_KVM_SERVER – All the standard packages required for a KVM server.
  • LCFG_OPTIONS_VIRT_MANAGER – The virt-manager application and dependencies.
  • LCFG_OPTIONS_QEMU_KVM – All the packages needed for QEMU to support KVM.

Note that, for ease of management, these now appear in the standard package list – lcfg_ubu2004_options.pkgs – and not a separate kvm-specific one.

It appears that some more work on the configuration is required before it behaves the same as with SL7. In particular, there appear to be differences in the default settings for authorization. It might be sensible to introduce a libvirt LCFG component to manage that configuration.

PostgreSQL

The version 13 series has been updated to 13.3 on SL7. See the security announcement for full details.

Support has been added for using postgis 3.1.2 with PostreSQL versions 12 and 13 on SL7.

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