Weekly Changes – 30/08/2021

This week is fairly quiet again but the changes do include an important fix for how we select the default kernel version on Ubuntu. Please note that due to holidays the release team are short-staffed this week, if any major issues are found during testing it is likely we will defer the release until next week. Here are the full details…

Ubuntu Kernel

The LCFG managed grub menu items on Ubuntu rely on the managed symlinks /boot/vmlinuz and /boot/initrd.img (and associated .old revisions). Whenever a kernel package is installed those symlinks are updated by the postinst script using the linux-update-symlinks script. That script updates the symlinks to point to the specific version of the kernel which has just been installed, typically when an administrator is updating the kernel manually that is what is required. For the LCFG managed platform we usually install two kernels – current and previous – this allows the option of rolling back to an earlier version if problems are found after upgrade. We have recently noticed that when a system is first installed, if multiple kernels are installed the older one ends up being the default kernel more often than not (i.e. it gets installed second). To avoid this problem of unexpectedly booting an older kernel version the LCFG kernel component has been updated to ensure the symlinks are always pointing to the current version. The configuration for the apt component has also been tweaked so that it runs the kernel component after updating any packages which require a reboot. These changes mean the Ubuntu platform now behaves more similarly to the older SL7 platform.

OpenAFS

Support has been added to SL7 and Ubuntu for the latest – 1.8.8 – release of OpenAFS. Currently this is still being tested so it is not yet the default version. See the release notes for full details. Notably this provides support for Linux up to 5.13 which will allow us to begin testing the 5.11 kernel on Ubuntu.

Configuration is now provided for aptly mirroring of the openafs ppa repository which allows easier to access to new releases. It is important to note that as provided those packages don’t work well with the LCFG strategy of upgrading kernel-related packages at boot time. For LCFG systems we modify the source packages to remove some unnecessary parts of the postinst script.

Software Changes

The libdpkg-perl package has been added to the Ubuntu base list, it provides various useful features such as the ability to easily compare Debian package version strings.

The apache2-utils package has been added to user-accessible DICE Ubuntu machines. It provides a range of useful utilities, notably the htpasswd tool which can be used to manage user files for basic authentication.

Support has been added to the DICE Ubuntu package lists for installing the nodejs yarn package manager. This can be enabled by defining the DICE_OPTIONS_NODE_YARN macro before including the dice/options/nodejs.h header into a profile.