Weekly Changes – 08/08/2022
After a few quiet weeks normal service is resumed. Most of the changes are targetted at supporting Ubuntu servers. There are also important updates for the latest generation of Dell servers. Here are all the details…
SL7 Installer
The kernel for the SL7 installer has been updated to 3.10.0-1160.71.1.el7. To use the new ISO for PXE booting the kernel-install-sl7-pxe must be updated to match, that change will be included in the next weekly release.
Kernel
The SL7 INF_TEST kernel has been updated to 3.10.0-1160.71.1.el7. This update significantly improves support for the Dell PERC H755 RAID controller which is used in the latest generation of PowerEdge servers (R350, R450). This will become the default SL7 INF kernel in the next release.
megaraid
We have recently discovered that on the latest generation of Dell PowerEdge servers (R350, R450) running the MegaCLI tool can hang the machine leaving it requiring a reboot. This affects servers with the latest firmware and either SL7 or Ubuntu Focal operating systems. Dell recommend instead using perccli on this hardware, the package for that tool was recently added to the lcfg/options/raid_megaraid_sas.h header, so it’s already available.
To avoid the potential for problems the lcfg/options/raid_megaraid.h header now has support for the RAID_TOOL_INHIBIT_MEGACLI macro which may be used to ensure the MegaCLI software is not installed for certain hardware. This is specified by default in the lcfg/hw/dell_poweredge_r350.h and lcfg/hw/dell_poweredge_r450.h headers.
The LCFG hardware monitoring component – hwmon – is designed to use MegaCLI to check the status of RAID drives. We plan to add support for perccli fairly soon.
DNS on Ubuntu servers
The standard DICE server configuration for Ubuntu now includes the LCFG DNS component. Note that this only installs the package, the component and named service still need to be started, if not done manually that will happen at the next reboot.
Matlab on DICE
The standard version of Matlab on DICE has been updated to 2022A
iptables
Work is ongoing to add support for Ubuntu to the LCFG iptables component.
NFS Server
A bug in the LCFG NFS component for Ubuntu has been fixed. Previously the NFS exports configuration file was created in the wrong location.
PXE Server
Work on adding support for an Ubuntu-based PXE server is now almost complete. A summary of the changes and new features can be found on the LCFG wiki.
As part of this new support, there is a new tool for managing the installer ISO on the PXE server. It can fetch the ISO from the LCFG website, unpack it for serving via NFS and extract the kernel/initrd files for PXE booting. This will remove the need to ship PXE kernels in separate packages. This will be the standard approach on Ubuntu, it can be included on SL7 systems via the lcfg/options/isotools.h header. Note that it requires Python 3 which is not installed by default on SL7.
PostgreSQL Server
Work has begun on providing support for PostgreSQL servers on Ubuntu. The plan is to support the standard version 12, provided by upstream Ubuntu, and version 14 from the PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG).
In Informatics we have a mirror of the pgdg apt repository for Ubuntu and it is now enabled for all Ubuntu systems.
Changes to headers and package lists
Members of the Informatics Computing team can browse all the changes to the headers and package lists.
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