Weekly Changes – 21/02/2022
As there was no release last week there are more software updates than is typical. Other than that most sites will not notice much change, most of it is related to work on porting the NFS/PXE/TFTP/install services to Ubuntu. Here are the full details…
logrotate configuration
Users of the lcfg/options/logrotate.h header (typically it’s pulled in through lcfg/options/privacy/utmp.h) will notice that the logrotate configuration for wtmp (the record of logins, logouts and such like) on the Ubuntu platform has been tweaked to more closely match that already provided for SL7. In particular, this makes the mode on /var/log/wtmp configurable (via the file.v_wtmp_mode resource), drops the minimum size on wtmp (since it often meant it was never rotated), changes the rotate on wtmp to keep 3 older logs instead of 1 but never keeps a file for more than 120 days.
Kernel
The INF_TEST kernel for Ubuntu Focal has been updated to 5.4.0-100.113. See USN-5294-1 for details on the bugs fixed.
VirtualBox
There is a new header – ed/options/virtualbox.h – and associated package list – ed/ed_ubu2004_vbox.pkgs – which can be used to include pre-built kernel modules for VirtualBox on the Ubuntu platform. On DICE systems we occasionally see problems with the virtualbox-dkms package not building new modules when new kernels are installed. It’s hard to be certain of the cause of the problem but it may well be related to the slightly unusual way we manage kernel versions by only upgrading them at boot-time. Using pre-built modules ensures the issue cannot occur and also improves the efficiency of the process.
Due to the package scripts for the virtualbox-dkms package, it’s not possible to remove since it deletes any modules which are now provided in the new packages. To workaround this issue the package has been marked with the ignore flag, this effectively leaves it unmanaged for existing installs and ensures that new installs do not get the package.
NFS on DICE
On DICE the dice/options/nfs-server.h header has always included an export of the local home disk as standard. This is not always necessary and could unexpectedly expose data so for Focal and beyond the DICE_OPTIONS_NFS_EXPORT_HOME macro will need to be defined to retain that behaviour.
TFTP
On the Ubuntu platform the TFTP service now defaults to serving files from the /srv/tftp directory. That can be changed by defining the LCFG_OPTIONS_TFTP_DIR macro before the inclusion of the header.
PXE
The pxeserver component has been updated to version 2 on the Ubuntu platform and the schema has been changed to version 5. This adds support for using grub as a boot-loader instead of syslinux. At this stage the grub configuration template is still rather simplistic and it requires a lot more testing before we are willing to declare it ready for use in non-development situations.
On the Ubuntu platform the PXE service also now defaults to files being created in the /srv/tftp directory.
Fully-Automatic Install
Some work has been done to add support for the Fully-Automatic Install (FAI) infrastructure. That is focussed around a new header – lcfg/options/fai-server.h – which pulls in the configuration for all the required NFS, TFTP and PXE services. This uses locally-built packages taken from Jammy Jellyfish to provide access to the latest version of FAI (5.10.3ubuntu1). At this stage this does not provide a fully working service, in particular we have identified a couple bugs which require fixing for the software to work on Focal.
New Software
The Ubuntu desktop platform has gained the Gnome vinagre remote desktop viewer application, notably it supports RDP, VNC and SPICE protocols.
Recent comments