Weekly Changes – 02/03/2026
A reasonable selection of changes this week, probably the most noticeable is a major update to the Noble HWE series. Here are the details of all the notable changes…
Kernel
On Noble the HWE kernel series is now 6.17.0. This isn’t yet supported for openafs and Virtualbox so, if necessary, a machine can be pinned back to the previous 6.14.0 series.
CEPH
The dependencies for the LCFG_OPTIONS_CEPH_CLIENT package option have been fixed on Ubuntu Noble.
BOSS cards
On DICE, there is a new header – dice/options/boss-root.h – to support using the Dell BOSS drives as the primary disk. This configures the fstab component accordingly, enables various SSD/nvme support and includes various utilities. It defaults to the, more recent, N1 drives but support for S1 can be selected by defining the DICE_OPTIONS_BOSS_ROOT_S1 macro.
Serial Consoles
The default baud rate for serial consoles has been changed to 115200 in the lcfg/options/serialconsole.h header.
rsyslog
On DICE, this week all machines logging to the central server will switch from connecting with UDP to TCP. The rsyslog server configuration also now supports enabling TLS. Individual clients can be configured to talk to a server using TLS by defining the RSYSLOG_USE_TLS macro at the top of an LCFG profile. The aim is to eventually move all clients over to this mode but for now it is just being tested on a small scale to understand what impact it will have on the server.
viewvc
A new resource – root_path_locale – has been added to the LCFG viewvc component. This can be used to specify the LC_CTYPE locale for root paths on your server. This defaults to en_GB.utf8 which seems to resolve the issues we have experienced when attempting to view LCFG headers that contain complex macros.
Slurm/Munge
The home directory for the munge user has been changed to /var/lib/munge. Previously it was /var/run/munge which caused a problem with the post-install script when upgrading packages.
Server hardware
There are new LCFG headers for the Dell PowerEdge R7715 and Dell PowerEdge R7625 server models.
Changes to headers and package lists
Members of the Informatics Computing team can browse all the changes to the headers and package lists. Note that the location of the diffs has changed, links to the old location will be rewritten.
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