This week sees the introduction of various new ed-level headers to help support LCFG users in the University of Edinburgh. Here are the details of the notable changes…

Linux auditd

To improve the maintainability of the package lists for the Linux audit daemon on Ubuntu there are new package options which are used by the various headers.

• LCFG_OPTIONS_AUDITD – auditd
• LCFG_OPTIONS_AUDISPD – audispd-plugins
• LCFG_OPTIONS_PYTHON_AUDIT – python3-audit

The contents of the lcfg/options/auditd.h and lcfg/defaults/auditd.h headers are currently rather muddled. This component was originally optional but has been part of the standard installation since SL7. This means that every profile includes the defaults header and most, but not all, also include the options header. That means some profiles may be missing out on important configuration, to resolve this we plan to slowly migrate the majority of the content into the defaults header.

ed-level headers

Some new headers were added to the ED layer this week. One set to configure two authentication and authorisation scenarios using ISG EASE and Central Authorisation services and two carrying macros defining common properties for the University’s site. These are not yet ready for general use and their development will be discussed at this week’s deployers’ meeting.

Evolution

The Exchange Web Services Plugin for Evolution (evolution-ews) package has been added to the LCFG_OPTIONS_EVOLUTION option for Jammy. This can be used to connect to Office365 accounts’ mail, directory and calendar.

Rust language

The Rust programming language has been upgraded to 1.75 on Ubuntu Jammy and 1.74 on Ubuntu Focal.

NetworkManager

There is now a header – lcfg/options/networkmanager.h – in case anyone needs to use NetworkManager rather than systemd-networkd. This allows the default Systemd resources to be tidied up for our standard Ubuntu configuration.

libgbm1 package dependency

The libgbm1 package (part of Mesa) gained a new dependency on libxcb-randr0 in Ubuntu Jammy 22.04.4 which was part of the previous stable release. This resulted in broken dependencies for various software, in particular qemu on KVM servers. This postship change has been resolved with the creation of a new LCFG_OPTIONS_LIBGBM package option which 13 options have been updated to use as a dependency.

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 – 04/03/2024 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0