This week sees the start of work on the Ubuntu server environment, there’s also a range of Ubuntu installer-related changes and updates to a variety of software collections for SL7. Here are all the details…

Software Collections

A number of the SL7 software collections have been updated:

Support for the ancient devtoolset-6 has been removed.

The very old git19 (version 1.9.4) collection has been replaced with the much newer rh-git227 (version 2.27.0). Use the lcfg/options/scl-git227.h or lcfg/options/scl-git227.h header, as appropriate, to include this new collection of packages.

DNS component

The LCFG DNS component has been ported to Ubuntu (version 6.5.1). There is a new schema (version 16) with some additional resources that allow the changing of paths to various configuration files:

rndcconf                /etc/rndc.conf
namedconf               /etc/named.conf
sysconfigfile           /etc/sysconfig/named
rndckey                 /etc/rndc.key

At this stage we are still testing the changes, we do not yet consider it to be production-ready.

Installer

The LCFG baseinstall component, which can be used to run component methods inside the newly installed chroot in the first phase of the install, has been prepared for use in the new Ubuntu installer.

The installroot continues to improve, it’s now possible to boot the Ubuntu installer, either from an ISO or via PXE, to the point of having a fully usable shell, that includes support for fetching the LCFG profile for the system.

Internationalization

As part of the work on the new Ubuntu installer, support for internationalization on that platform has been added to the lcfg/defaults/i18n.h header. In particular, this deals with locales and keyboard layout. Note that this header is currently only used for Redhat systems and not on Ubuntu.

nvme and SSD disks on DICE

The handling of the DICE_OPTIONS_SSD_DISK_ROOT macro has been shuffled from dice/options/nvme-root.h to the more appropriate dice/options/ssd-disk.h header. This is not expected to affect any existing installations but makes it slightly easier to use the ssd-disk.h header on its own.

Studentlab header for Bayes

A basic DICE header – dice/options/studentlabs-bayes.h – has been added for student lab machines in the Bayes centre.

Novatech PC-BX20184

We have added new headers – lcfg/hw/novatech_PC-BX20184.h and dice/hw/novatech_PC-BX20184.h – for Novatech PC-BX20184 desktop tower machines. These machines are expected to always have an SSD root disk and the network card be named enp4s0.

Changes to headers and package lists

Members of the Informatics Computing team can browse all the changes to the headers and package lists.

Weekly Changes – 09/05/2022 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0