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LCFG Project

LCFG Project

Recent Activity for the LCFG project

Weekly Changes – 20/01/2025

Lots of small changes this week, many related to the work on the new Ubuntu Noble platform. Here are the details of all the notable changes…

Ubuntu Noble

Release notes are available for all the significant changes in the Noble platform.

Systemd

The way the LCFG systemd component manages the journald configuration has changed in Noble. It now uses a drop-in file in /etc/systemd/journald.conf.d/, this more closely aligns with the way Systemd expects the local configuration to be specified. To avoid unexpected behaviour, the component will also automatically mask any upstream configurations found in /usr/lib/systemd/journald.conf.d/ that have been provided by packages.

rsyslog

On Noble the rsyslog service now uses a configuration file in the standard location – /etc/rsyslog.conf – which helps on systems that have apparmor enabled.

When rsyslog is enabled (the default) then journald is now configured to not send all messages to syslog, this is because rsyslog is already importing them using the imjournal module.

Virtual Machines

By default VMs using the lcfg/options/virtual_hardware.h header will no longer have firmware packages installed and the selection of kernel modules will also be reduced. This saves a significant amount of disk space and also makes installs much faster. If you’re accessing unusual hardware directly from a VM (e.g. not via the virtualisation layer) there is a small chance you might need to add something back.

Dell System Update (dsu)

There is a new version of dsu available – 2.1.1.0 – which provides support for Dell servers running Ubuntu Noble.

iptables

The iptables and ip6tables Systemd services are now linked to netfilter-persistent.service in the standard way on all platforms. This was previously handled by the alternatives system on Focal and Jammy.

To avoid a conflict, the ufw (uncomplicated firewall) package will now be removed when iptables is included via the lcfg/options/iptables.h header.

polkit

We noticed that new configuration files for polkit in Noble unexpectedly resulted in anyone in the admin group being considered as a local administrator. This seems to be because we had specified the list of administrators to be empty. It is clearly safer to have this default to a non-empty string so we have now set the default to be the root user.

grub boot loader

The default kernel type on Noble is now always set to linux, the old linuxefi is no longer supported.

Java

Support for some Java versions was broken last week due to a mistake in the soy dependencies. It is likely to only have been a noticeable problem for small server installs, desktops will have got the dependencies in other ways.

rsync updates

Emergency updates to rsync have been removed since the latest versions are now in the standard updates package lists.

MegaCLI

MegaCLI was replaced by PercCLI a long time ago and it is likely that the newer software supports all hardware currently in use. The MegaCLI software package will now only be included for EL7 and when explicitly required.

Changes to headers and package lists

Members of the Informatics Computing team can browse all the changes to the headers and package lists.

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