Beyond the usual security updates, there has not been much recent change due to strike action. A small amount of mopping up continues after the Ubuntu 20.04.4 release, we will probably encounter a few more similar issues yet. Here are all the details…

SMART disk monitoring

A new LCFG header – lcfg/options/smartmon.h – has been created which provides support for the smartmontools service on Ubuntu. The smartmontools package provides utilities to control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA/SATA, SCSI/SAS and NVMe disks. This is now enabled for all physical (i.e. non-virtual) DICE Ubuntu desktops and we plan to incorporate the status information into our clientreport so we can more easily identify failing disks.

Kernel

The Ubuntu INF_TEST kernel has been updated to 5.4.0-105.119.

Ubuntu installroot

As part of the project to investigate possible replacement installers for our Ubuntu platform an LCFG installroot is being developed. This will work in a similar way to that provided for SL7. At this stage it is only an experimental prototype.

Post-ship software

With the release of Ubuntu 20.04.4 several package options – including LCFG_OPTIONS_EVOLUTION, LCFG_OPTIONS_GIMP and DESKTOP_PACKAGES – have a new dependency on the libopengl0 package.

DICE client report

The clientreport has a new module that reports on the Linux Volume Manager (LVM), it lists all volume groups and the logical volumes with details on name, size and free space. The disk module now reports SMART status information when available. The GPU module now gracefully handles any failure from the nvidia-smi command so that the reports can be queried to find GPU servers with problems.

Weekly Changes – 28/03/2022 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0