Most of the changes this week are related to the new installer. Please note that although the snapshot for this release has been made and tested in December, it will not go live until Wednesday 4th January 2023. Here all the notable changes…

Ubuntu Installer

The School of Physics have been helping with testing the new installer, that revealed a range of minor issues which have now been resolved. We would appreciate it if other sites could begin similar testing, please contact us to find out what you need to do.

There is a new macro – LCFG_INSTALL_LOCAL_KEYRING – which can be used to synchronise an additional site-specific keyring file into the /usr/share/keyrings/ directory of the target chroot. You either need to already have this file in the installer via a package (let us know and we can add a package for your site) or use something like wget to fetch it directly from your web server.

The ordering of the kerberos, kdcregister and wallet sshkeys install methods have been tweaked to fix the support for sites which do NOT have GSSAPI authentication enabled for profile access.

The installer can now cope with the hostname in the DHCP response being in either short or fully-qualified form.

fstab component

The new fstab component for Ubuntu now creates any missing mount points for items in the entries list.

PXE Service

The ed-level PXE server header – ed/options/pxeserver.h – has gained support for the new installer. The basic platform is named focal (c.f. the legacy installer which uses focal_amd64). The option with GSSAPI authentication enabled for profile access is named focalkauth. If the NFS root path is not provided via the DHCP response then the parent directory (e.g. 129.215.202.179:/export/linux/installroot) may be specified using the ED_OPTIONS_PXE_NFSROOT macro.

Similarly, the ed-level PXE client header – ed/options/pxeclient.h – has gained support for the new installer platform.

Kernel

DICE Ubuntu machines have switched to following the 5.15 series hardware enablement (HWE) kernel.

aptly

The aptly software has been updated to 1.5 on EL7 and 1.4 (with extra patches) on Ubuntu to add support for the zstd compression algorithm. This is necessary to handle Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) and other newer distributions.

elasticsearch mirror

The aptly mirror configuration for elasticsearch packages for Ubuntu has been updated to version 8, the new mirror is named elastic8.

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 – 19/12/2022 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0