This week mainly has various improvements to the basics of the Ubuntu server environment, here are all the details…

Kernel

The INF_TEST kernel version for Ubuntu Focal has been updated to 5.4.0-110.124 and the hardware enablement (HWE) kernel has been updated to 5.13.0-40.45~20.04.1.

It is now also possible to prevent the inclusion of the kernel header packages by adding the LCFG_KERNEL_NO_HEADERS macro to the profile.pkgcppopts resource. The packages are quite large so this is useful for saving space on really small installs where it will never be necessary to rebuild kernel modules.

Apache

A new schema version (6) has been added for the apacheconf component. This introduces a new main_conf resource that defaults to conf/httpd.conf for backwards-compatibility with Redhat. On Debian/Ubuntu platforms this should be set to apache2.conf to match the standard location of the main configuration file. When a relative path is given for the file it is assumed to be in the directory specified in the serverroot resource (which defaults to /etc/httpd on Redhat and /etc/apache2 on Debian/Ubuntu). The component code will be updated in the next weekly release to utilise the new resource.

NTP

Work is ongoing to port the LCFG ntp component to Ubuntu. A new schema version (4) has been added for the ntp component. This introduces a new sysconfigfile resource that defaults to /etc/default/ntp on Debian/Ubuntu. Previously this was hard-wired in the component code to be /etc/sysconfig/ntpd.

On DICE there is now support for testing the NTP daemon on Ubuntu by defining the _DICE_OPTIONS_NTP_ENABLE macro at the top of an LCFG profile.

DNS

Work is ongoing to port the LCFG dns component to Ubuntu. This week some minor packaging issues have been resolved. There is also now a systemd preset to ensure that the named service is not automatically started in a misconfigured state when the packages are first installed.

Ubuntu Installer

The fstab component now has support for partitioning and formatting disks at install time using the FAI setup-storage utility. Work is ongoing to incorporate that into the new Ubuntu installer.

New package repository

There is a new inf-users package repository for Ubuntu Focal. This is intended for sharing a small number of software packages with users in the School of Informatics.

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 – 16/05/2022 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0