There is quite a range of mostly small changes this week, along with one particularly notable improvement to how the grub configuration is managed on Ubuntu. Here are the full details…

Ubuntu grub configuration

The LCFG grub2 component now provides an lcfg-aware equivalent of the standard update-grub script which can be used to safely update the grub configuration. This will hopefully resolve a longstanding issue with Ubuntu machines occasionally being left in an unbootable state. For full details see the separate blog article discussing this topic.

lightdm login improvements

We have noticed in Informatics that some users experience problems logging in to our desktop machines due to whitespace in the username field. We believe this mostly occurs when a user “wakes” a system by pressing the space-bar because the screen has been blanked. It’s quite difficult to spot that spaces have been inserted into the box ahead of typing your username. To improve the usability of the graphical login screen, we are currently investigating adding a trimspaces module to the authentication section of the PAM stack for lightdm. We’ve done a quick review of the code, it all looks fairly reasonable so once it’s had sufficient testing we expect to roll this out to all our Ubuntu desktops. Other sites interested in trying out this facility may do so by defining the LIGHTDM_TRIMSPACES macro ahead of the inclusion of the lcfg/options/lightdm.h header file.

Let’s Encrypt Support

The LCFG x509 component has a new schema (version 10) that adds support for specifying additional environment variables which will be added to the Let’s Encrypt dehydrated configuration file. The new resources are the tag list le_extra_env with associated sub-resources leenvvar_$ and leenvval_$. For example, it can be used like:

!x509.le_extra_env         mADD(example)
x509.leenvvar_example      EXAMPLE_VARNAME
x509.leenvval_example      Example Value

There is also a new resource – le_preferred_chain – which can be used to set the PREFERRED_CHAIN environment variable.

This needs version 0.1.16 of the component which will be rolled out in the next weekly release.

DICE Server Checks

The network bonding configuration for servers is now verified when a system appears to have more than one NIC.

pbuilder improvement

The default configuration for pbuilder chroots managed with the LCFG component has been changed to ensure that packages always include the source when they are rebuilt. This was done to make it easier to rebuild upstream packages using the Informatics pkgforge service. This has the minor potential to cause trouble if building packages for submission to an upstream repository. In Informatics our repositories are configured to ignore the same source being submitted on multiple occasions.

System macro tweak

The LCFG_SYSTEMD_UNIT_WANTEDBY macro has been tweaked so that it completely override any prior usage of the LCFG_SYSTEMD_UNIT_MASK for the same service.

Test kernels

The INF_TEST kernel for Ubuntu is now version 5.4.0-89.100 and for SL7 it is 3.10.0-1160.45.1.el7.

Weekly Changes – 01/11/2021 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0