Weekly Changes – 16/08/2021

This week there are just a few changes, the most significant of which is an update for the LCFG client code. Here are all the details…

LCFG Client

The LCFG client Perl libraries have been updated to 4.8.0 on both SL7 and Ubuntu Focal platforms. Although this appears to be a bigger jump in version for SL7 most of the changes are related to packaging for Ubuntu. The new version has been tested on both platforms for several weeks so we are confident this won’t cause any problems. The most notable changes are:

The lcfg-checkreboot script now touches a file – /run/lcfg/rebooting when a reboot is enforced at boot-time (e.g. just after kernel packages have been updated). Systemd service files may now use ConditionPathExists=!/run/lcfg/rebooting in the [Unit] section to avoid starting when a reboot is going to happen. This is most useful for avoid a long delay with the openafs client service failing to start after a kernel upgrade.
The LCFG::Client::Fetch::Auth::GSSAPI module now tries harder to avoid problems related to truncated Kerberos credential cache files. That can happen if a disk becomes full, the GSSAPI library doesn’t handle the situation well and without this the credentials don’t get renewed when required. For details see bug#1229.
The Systemd service file for rdxprof on Ubuntu has been altered to ensure it is always restarted if it fails. This resolves bug#1224, thanks to Matthew Richardson for the suggestion.
Following a recent code review, the API for the LCFG::Client::ProfileFetcher module has been improved slightly and the documentation has been updated.

New Software

The libfile-mimeinfo-perl package and dependencies have been added to user-accessible DICE Ubuntu systems. This provides the useful mimetype and mimeopen commands which are referred to in the DICE computing.help page which explains how to set default applications.

Ubuntu postship

The libgl1-mesa-dri packages in Ubuntu Focal have been rebuilt against the latest version of the llvm libraries – libllvm12. This is a new library that wasn’t shipped in the original platform so this requires a post-ship fix. This is the second time this has occurred – it was previously rebuilt against libllvm11 – so this replaces an earlier fix. The new package option macro – LCFG_OPTIONS_LIBGL – means this chunk of config can also be massively simplified.

Virtual DICE

In preparation for a new release of the virtual dice platform for Semester 1 of the 2021/2022 academic year a large amount of configuration has been imported into our LCFG headers. Presently, this is a work in progress, an announcement will be sent out once it is ready for testing.