This week mainly sees various small improvements for SL7 to allow the dynamic building of kernel modules which should help with support for modern hardware. Here are all the details…

dkms

There is a new header for including the Dynamic Kernel Module Support (dkms) software on SL7 and Ubuntu machines. On SL7 as well as installing the package this will add the Systemd dkms.service to multi-user.target. The package and dependencies are included in the profile by adding LCFG_OPTIONS_DKMS to the profile.pkgcppopts resource. Note that extra dependencies have been specified on SL7 so that dkms may be used during the install process (i.e. it may be included in the very-minimalist installbase profiles as well as those which use the standard base list).

installbase

It was noticed that the SL7 installbase profiles had been using the wrong epel package lists.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox on Ubuntu Focal has been updated to 6.1.26

pam_access rules

The LCFG accessconf component may be used to manage the access.conf configuration file for the pam_access module. To simplify creating access rules a new cpp macro has been added – ACCESSCONF_RULE(POLICY,RULE,ENTITY,ORIGIN). It may be used like this:

!accessconf.policies          mADD(access)
ACCESSCONF_RULE(access,owner,user1234,ALL)

The macro takes the policy tag (which must already exist), a rule tag, the entity to match for the rule (e.g. user, group, or netgroup) and the access permission.

Student Lab access authorization

The Informatics student lab access rules have changed. Previously all DICE users were permitted to login to all lab machines both locally and remotely. There are now two separate netgroups which are used to control local (login/studentlabs/local) and remote (login/studentlabs/remote) access. Those capabilities have been added to all relevant roles.

mock

For consistency, the mock component package version was updated to match the recent update to the schema package.

Kernel

The SL7 INF_TEST version was updated to 3.10.0-1160.41.1.el7.

Weekly Changes – 13/09/2021 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0