After holidays normal service has now returned with a variety of small changes this week, here are the details…

Ubuntu network configuration

Some of the kernel sysctl settings on Ubuntu have been altered to bring them into line with those on SL7. These only affect machines which use VLANs but are safe for setting on all machines.

net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter = 0
net.ipv4.conf.all.rp_filter = 0
net.ipv4.conf.default.accept_source_route = 0

LCFG client testing

There is a new minor release of the LCFG client – 4.8.0 – which improves a few small issues. In particular, this includes improvements to the interface and documentation for the LCFG::Client::ProfileFetcher fetcher module based on a recent code review. There are also minor fixes for a Kerberos credentials cache truncation issue (bug#1229) and improvements to the rdxprof.service Systemd file on Ubuntu (bug#1214) to deal with unexpected failures of the rdxprof service. These changes are currently being tested, if all goes well this will become the new stable version next week.

The lcfg/options/lcfg-client-testing.h header now supports Debian-based platforms as well as Redhat.

Ubuntu package options

There are a lot of confusing changes in the Ubuntu options package list – lcfg_ubu2004_options.pkgs – this is due to the introduction of the new LCFG_OPTIONS_LIBGL option which provides some of the most commonly required dependencies.

HP EliteDesk G5

Some of the HP G5 desktop machines in Informatics are fitted with wifi cards. As we no longer require the wifi support we have added a header which can be used to disable the kernel driver – dice/options/disable_iwlwifi.h (and lcfg/options/disable_iwlwifi.h). That header is included by default for all HP G5 machines with DICE installed.

VirtualBox

The version of VirtualBox on Ubuntu has been updated to 6.1.22. See the changelog for details.

ElasticSearch

Support has been added for mirroring the ElasticSearch package repository for Ubuntu. There is also basic support for enabling logstash and filebeat services. This is very much a prototype service which we are in the process of investigating. Given recent license issues we may well not continue with this software, there are open-source options such as OpenSearch which look like reasonable alternatives.

Kernel versions

The versions supported for the SL7 rollback – previous – kernel release have been tweaked.

pbuilder

Ubuntu 21.04 – Hirsute Hippo is now supported as the latest non-LTS platform in place of 20.10 – Groovy Gorilla. Support has also been added for Debian 11 – bullseye – which will soon be the new stable release.

Weekly Changes – 09/08/2021 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0