The changes this week are nearly all focussed on supporting the Ubuntu server environment. There has been significant testing of Apache configurations which give us confidence that this is now fully functional in Ubuntu. Here are all the details…

OpenAFS

Some extra OpenAFS client-side libraries have been added on Ubuntu. These are needed for some software (such as the Apache waklog module) and it makes the library provision more similar to SL7.

Apache

There has been extensive testing of the apacheconf, x509 and cosign components on Ubuntu. A few changes have been made as a result:

• The apacheconf component will now be triggered to reconfigure whenever other packages install or update files in the /usr/share/lcfg/conf/apacheconf directory.
• The permissions on the managed groups directory (lcfg.groups.d) have been fixed so that Apache can always read the contents.
• The groupfile authorization module has been added to the default list.

The waklog module which supports AFS access has been packaged and tested on Ubuntu.

On Ubuntu support for CGI scripts is intentionally not enabled by default, this is a significant change in behaviour from SL7. To enable the CGI module you must include the dice/options/apacheconf-cgi.h (or lcfg/options/apacheconf-cgi.h) header.

For a summary of all the notable differences between SL7 and Ubuntu see the LCFG wiki.

On DICE many definitions of the DICE_OPTIONS_APACHECONF_USER and DICE_OPTIONS_APACHECONF_GROUP macros have been removed where, unnecessarily, they specified the SL7 default of apache. This should simplify porting the service to Ubuntu.

Perl Catalyst

Several new package options have been added for the Perl Catalyst web framework on Ubuntu:

• LCFG_OPTIONS_PERL_CATALYST_VIEW_TT – Template Toolkit support
• LCFG_OPTIONS_PERL_CATALYST_PLUGINS_BASIC – configloader, stacktrace, static-simple and subrequest plugins
• LCFG_OPTIONS_PERL_CATALYST_MODEL_DBICSCHEMA – DBIx::Class::Schema-based database model
• LCFG_OPTIONS_PERL_CATALYST_ACTIONS_BASIC – renderview and rest actions

By default, the lcfg/options/perl-catalyst.h header will enable the PLUGINS_BASIC, ACTIONS_BASIC and VIEW_TT package options. If the PERL_CATALYST_DBIC_SCHEMA macro is specified then the MODEL_DBICSCHEMA package option will also be enabled.

RFE

The server-side support for the remote file editor(RFE) has been tested on Ubuntu. This involved patching the Perl module in the libauthen-krb5-perl package to add support for the aname_to_localname function.

NFS

The server-side support for NFS has been tested on Ubuntu. It was noted that nn systems with nfs-utils version 1.0.x or newer (e.g. Ubuntu Focal and beyond) a noisy warning message appears regarding the ‘subtree_check‘ option. Unless you really need that feature you should add the ‘no_subtree_check‘ option for all exports.

LCFG Server

The LCFG server component is now available for Ubuntu. Currently, it still manages the mkxprof service directly, in the same way as SL7, at some point it will need to be updated to use the Systemd service.

The LCFG server has been tested on Ubuntu using the DICE site configuration. This mainly required updating the paths in various resources to point to the correct locations for Ubuntu. Mostly that can be done in a platform-independent way using the sysinfo resources (e.g. /var/lcfg/conf/ on SL7 is better specified as <%sysinfo.path_lcfgconf%>).

PkgForge

The Package Forge web interface has been ported to Ubuntu. This provides a good test of many aspects of the standard Apache support, in particular, cosign, waklog and the Perl Catalyst web framework.

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 – 13/06/2022 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0