This week is mostly changes to support services on the Ubuntu Jammy platform, note that we have now begun investigating supporting the LCFG server on Ubuntu. Here are the details of all the notable changes…

LCFG Server

Work has begun on supporting the LCFG server on Ubuntu. Currently we are investigating a bug in the handling of references in LCFG resource values which means the server occasionally mistakenly throws an error about circular references.

Please note, we will not provide support for running the legacy preseed Ubuntu Focal installer from an Ubuntu-based LCFG server, only the new installer will be supported.

To avoid the potential for confusion, all support for the old LCFG defaults packages has been removed from the DICE LCFG master server.

Console Server

Work on Ubuntu support for conserver is now almost complete. There is new support for configuring the options for the daemon, that is particularly useful when it is necessary to change the network port on which it listens. Currently this is done using the LCFG file component but it will be folded back into the conserver component later. As part of that development work, there is a new schema (version 4) with the following new resources: clientconf, clienttmpl, sysconfig_file, sysconfig_tmpl and port.

On DICE, console access to KVM from the console servers is changing from a shared principal to per-host principals.

PostgreSQL

There are security updates for PostgreSQL – 11.21, 12.16, 13.12, 14.9 and 15.4 – see the news article for full details.

Please note that PostgreSQL 11 will stop receiving fixes on November 9, 2023.

OpenAFS

The LCFG openafs component has been updated to support Ubuntu Jammy.

AFS will, by default, listen and advertise all IPs that the OS presents. This has recently caused issues with the appearance of the idrac interface with a 169.254.*.* private IP, so on DICE our servers now excludes that and another private IP range.

NodeJS

There is new support for mirroring the upstream NodeJS repository for version 18 (long term support) release from nodesource This can be enabled using the APTLY_MIRROR_NODEJS18 macro. The local apt repository can be included on a machine using the ED_OPTIONS_PACKAGES_NODEJS18 macro.

Note that the package conflicts with some standard packages provided by Ubuntu including libnode72, libnode-dev and npm. On DICE, there is a new header – dice/options/nodejs-lts.h – which can be used to install the newer version of nodejs, ensuring there are no package conflicts.

rmirror

There is a new version of the LCFG rmirror component, this just adds support for Ubuntu Jammy.

HP EliteDesk G9 mini

There are new lcfg/hw/hp_elitedesk800g9_mini.h and dice/hw/hp_elitedesk800g9_mini.h headers for the HP EliteDesk G9 mini. It is assumed that the system has an NVME SSD root disk and boots in UEFI mode.

Software

There is a new package option for Ubuntu – LCFG_OPTIONS_JUPYTERLAB – which may be used to install the python3-jupyterlab-server package and dependencies.

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 – 28/08/2023 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0