This weeks sees a couple of important improvements to the kernel component for Ubuntu. Here are the details of all the notable changes…

Kernel component

Part of the configuration process carried out by the LCFG kernel component is to ensure the symlinks to the kernel and initrd files (e.g. /boot/vmlinuz and /boot/initrd.img) are up-to-date. On Ubuntu this is done using the install-update-symlinks utility. It turns out that this utility will not complain if the initramfs file for the target kernel does not exist, it just creates a symlink to nothing (bug#1358). To avoid this problem the MakeLinks method in the kernel component will now ensure that the selected kernel has an associated valid initramfs file and will warn if it is missing. It will also now flag an error when no valid kernels are found.

Another issue we have seen is that occasionally the Ubuntu package manager will succeed in removing old kernels but fail to install any new ones. To, hopefully, help avoid that bad situation there is a new lcfg-kernel-image package which requires at least one kernel package to be installed. With that package installed removing all kernel packages would cause a conflict so the apt component will not proceed.

flexlm license manager

The lcfg/options/flexlm.h header now has support for an LCFG_OPTIONS_FLEXLM_SPOOF option which can be enabled to include support for the libfakery library on Ubuntu.

nut UPS monitoring

By default the lcfg/options/nut2.h header will now only include the client packages. For complete server support, one of LCFG_OPTIONS_NUT2_MODE_NETSERVER or LCFG_OPTIONS_NUT2_MODE_STANDALONE options must be enabled. The server packages list now also includes support for snmp.

Manually Setting Root Password

In situations where you want to manually manage root’s password and not publish a hash in your LCFG profiles or headers the auth component can be configured not to manage the shadow file. A new header at ed/options/auth/common/manual-rootpwd.h does this and checks that the root password has actually been set every night. Note that this option prevents other user accounts having password hashes managed as this auth component setting is not per account.

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 – 03/06/2024 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0