A variety of small changes this week, here are the details of all the notable changes…

XScreenSaver

The LCFG configuration for XScreenSaver has been modified to remove the “New Login” button from the screen unlock dialog. Usually we don’t want multiple X sessions running for different people on a machine. Due to the way X server resources behave, this had to be done in a slightly peculiar way involving a custom wrapper script. Thanks to Kenny MacDonald for the solution to this problem which has been puzzling us for quite a while!

Ubuntu devel packages

The configuration for the devel apt package repository on Ubuntu has been removed from the lcfg-layer as this is actually a DICE-specific chunk of configuration. It was only ever enabled for profiles following the develop release so we didn’t notice until other sites recently began using their own release with that name.

aptly

There is a new aptly-keyrings package which provides keyring files for various upstream repositories that sites may wish to mirror. Currently it provides: chrome-remote-desktop.gpg, conda.gpg, elasticsearch-keyring.gpg, google-chrome.gpg, microsoft.gpg, owncloud-client.gpg Using these individual files is more manageable and secure than having a single large keyring containing all possible keys for all sites. The default resources for mirrors in the ed-level aptly headers will be updated to use them soon.

SL7 kernel

The default SL7 kernel has been updated to version 3.10.0-1160.114.2.el7. Note that this does not, yet, affect any systems following the INF kernel versions.

OpenAFS

All support for the old 1.8.8 release of OpenAFS have been removed from EL7.

nagios

The LCFG nagios service has gained support for sending notifications to channels in MS Teams. This is based on code from the nagios-msteams project on github. The LCFG nagios_server component manages a new configuration file – /etc/nagios-plugins/nagios-msteams.ini – which provides the mapping between contact names and web hook URLs. This should mean we are now ready to upgrade our nagios service to Ubuntu.

EdLAN Subnets

Additional subnet definitions for LapLAN, various user classes of eduroam, the IS VPN and MS DirectAccess services were added to a renamed ed/options/edlan-subnets.h header file. Only space separated lists of CIDR format subnets are defined as we expect all modern software to accept them.

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 – 25/03/2024 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0