This week sees further minor enhancements which make it easier to use the new Ubuntu installer. There are also various improvements to the Ubuntu server environment. Here are all the details…

Disk/partition management

Some useful new macros have been added for using the fstab component with the new Ubuntu installer. These are particularly useful for managing extra disks, i.e. not the primary disk and system partitions which are managed using other macros.

/* Add any disk, specifying the naming scheme for the partitions */

FSTAB_DISK(example1,sdb,/dev/%d%i)

/* Add a SCSI disk */

FSTAB_SCSI_DISK(example2,sdc)

/* Add a partition for a disk */

FSTAB_SCSI_DISK(example3,sdd)
FSTAB_DISK_PART(example3,data,/disk/data,free,ext4,no,"defaults,nodev")

PXE bootloader

The way in which the PXE bootloader is specified for hosts using the dhclient component has changed. It is now controlled through the lcfg/options/select-pxe.h header which may be included multiple times. This makes it easier to override the default boot mode for a specific system or particular hardware model. Note that on Ubuntu systems that boot in UEFI mode it defaults to the grub bootloader (grub/grubnetx64.efi.signed) rather than syslinux. Informatics and some other schools have found grub to be more reliable for that platform.

DNS

The LCFG dns component has been updated to improve the way a zone-transfer address is selected, the code now ensures that only a single address will be returned.

DHCP Service

A start has been made on adding support for running a DHCP service on Ubuntu. Previously, most of the LCFG resources were only specified in the DICE headers, an effort has now been made to add useful defaults for other sites, it is likely that more will be required before it can be used outside of Informatics. For compatibility, a dhcpd.service service alias has been added on Ubuntu which points to isc-dhcp-server.service.

Currently, the LCFG component does not work on Ubuntu, there is a known problem with how a new configuration file is generated, we hope to resolve that issue fairly soon.

lightdm

The LCFG lightdm component has been updated to add support for the new minimum_vt resource which can be used to specify the virtual terminal on which to run the lightdm login manager.

Snapd

The effort to completely remove snapd continues. We discovered after removing the packages that the /etc/profile.d/apps-bin-path.sh configuration file still remains in place. That causes the non-existent /snap/bin directory to be added to the default PATH environment variable. The problem file has been removed using the LCFG file component.

runner component

The LCFG runner component has been updated to add support for manually running specific tasks. This is mostly useful for debugging tasks. They should be specified on the command-line for the run method like this:

om runner run -- lcfg_x509

HP G6 mini

A new header has been added for the HP EliteDesk 800 G6 “desktop mini”. Please note that this has not yet been tested for DICE.

Django

Support has been added for using the Python Django web framework on Ubuntu.

Informatics Web Sites

The informatics-web-assets package is now available for Ubuntu. This provides a collection of images, style sheets, and a header and footer SSI for the “Informatics look”.

DICE Serial support

DICE Ubuntu systems with a serial console will now default to PXE booting using the focalserial option which uses the new installer. This helps with installing on some server models where it is not possible to actively make a choice using the keyboard.

PkgForge

The PkgForge master service can now validate source RPMs when running on the Ubuntu platform.

Software

There are some new software options available for Ubuntu:

• LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_NETADDR – python3-netaddr
• LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_LDAP – python3-ldap
• LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_GEOIP – python3-geoip
• LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_DJANGO – python3-django
• LCFG_OPTIONS_DHCPD – ISC DHCP server

These can be enabled by adding the option name to the profile.pkgcppopts resource, for example:

!profile.pkgcppopts mADD(LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_LDAP)

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 – 23/01/2023 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0