Quite a few recent changes are focussed on porting our package server to Ubuntu, once that is done we will be able to support weekly releases for Ubuntu Jammy. Here are the details of all significant changes…

Network component

On Ubuntu, the support for ‘auto‘ lookups of IP addresses for interfaces has been reworked. This improves the support for interfaces with multiple addresses and should also, hopefully, avoid a system getting stuck in a reboot-loop if an error has been made in the resources.

Multiple addresses on the same subnet are managed differently on Ubuntu with netplan. Previously on SL7, this was done by having a separate virtual interface for each address (e.g. bond0:1, bond0:2). The new way associates all the addresses with a single interface. To achieve this, simply add the extra IP addresses to the ipaddr resource for the interface, for example:

!network.ipaddr_bond0    mADD(129.215.202.192)

There is also new support for avoiding entries being added to the /etc/hosts file, that can now be achieved by setting the hostsorder resource for the interface to be ‘ignore‘.

These changes bring a new dependency on the libregexp-common-perl package.

cron PAM configuration

We discovered that the default PAM configuration for cron on Ubuntu was blocking access to local system users. This is due to the pam_access module being include in the common-account stack. For DICE systems we have modified the account modules stack for cron to simply be the pam_permit module, which matches with the configuration we have on SL7. Other sites may wish to do something similar, it can be done like this:

!pam.acctmods_cron		mSET(permit)

Kernel

The Ubuntu Focal INF_TEST kernel has been updated to 5.15.0-69.76~20.04.1.

apt mirrors

The ed/options/packages.h has gained support for configuring apt to use some possible local mirrors of apt repositories which may be managed with aptly. These may be enabled by defining any of the following macros:

• ED_OPTIONS_PACKAGES_ATOM – Atom editor
• ED_OPTIONS_PACKAGES_CHROME – Chrome browser
• ED_OPTIONS_PACKAGES_CONDA – Conda package manager
• ED_OPTIONS_PACKAGES_GHC – Glasgow Haskell Compiler
• ED_OPTIONS_PACKAGES_MENDELEY – Reference management software
• ED_OPTIONS_PACKAGES_MONO – .NET framework
• ED_OPTIONS_PACKAGES_OPENAFS – OpenAFS
• ED_OPTIONS_PACKAGES_PGDG – PostgreSQL
• ED_OPTIONS_PACKAGES_ROS – Robot Operating System
• ED_OPTIONS_PACKAGES_ROS2 – Robot Operating System version 2
• ED_OPTIONS_PACKAGES_SBT – Scala bintray (upstream now defunct)
• ED_OPTIONS_PACKAGES_SUMO – Traffic simulation software
• ED_OPTIONS_PACKAGES_VSCODE – Visual Studio Code

Note that not all of these repositories will be available for both Focal and Jammy.

pkglist-tools

The pkglist-tools collection of utilities has been split for Ubuntu so that the RPM-related code is in a separate optional pkglist-tools-rpm package. To include that package and all the dependencies the PKGLIST_TOOLS_RPM macro must be defined before including the header. The code for running createrepo has also been updated to use the createrepo_c command in Ubuntu.

refreshpkgs

The refreshpkgs code has been updated to use the createrepo_c command in Ubuntu and handle the change in filesystem location for some commands.

aptly

A small change has been made to the LCFG aptly component to make it possible to force the generation of a new snapshot for a local repository when using the incoming method.

The sbt_bintray repository has been dropped since the upstream is no longer available.

For Focal, the configuration for the ROS2 (robot operating system) repository has been added.

Software

There are some new software options available for Ubuntu:

• LCFG_OPTIONS_MPI_DEFAULT_DEV – MPI development files
• LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_RPM – the Python 3 rpm module
• LCFG_OPTIONS_SWIG – swig tool that connects programs written in C/C++ with a variety of scripting languages

Some other options have been tweaked to use the new LCFG_OPTIONS_MPI_DEFAULT_DEV option.

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 – 24/04/2023 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0