A fairly quiet week, the main change is an improved method of managing kernel versions that should make it much more robust. Here are the details of all the notable changes…

Kernels

We are trialling a new approach for managing the Ubuntu kernel package lists. Maintaining the information in those files is very fiddly, error prone and time consuming so we’re working on some new scripts to automate the process as much as possible. Those are driven by YAML configuration files which are stored in the same directory. Note that the LCFG server moans about the YAML files when it sees them – unknown file type ignored – but this is completely harmless. The transition to generating these files using a template has caused a small amount of noise with changes to the comments.

X509 and Let’s Encrypt

There is a new header – lcfg/options/x509-letsencrypt-dns.h – which makes it easier to use the LCFG x509 component with Let’s Encrypt and the DNS challenge.

nut UPS monitoring

Informatics recently experienced a power outage which resulted in an unexpected large-scale graceful shutdown of servers whilst there was still sufficient runtime in the UPS. Investigations revealed that the nut clients briefly lost contact with the monitoring host which triggered an immediate reboot. This was because some settings were too low, in particular the DEADTIME was the default value of 15 seconds. This option and the polling frequencies have now been increased to something more sensible.

Robot Operating System

The ROS2 package repository can now be enabled by including the new ed/options/ros2-packages.h header. Previously this could only be enabled by a specifying a macro at the start of a profile which wasn’t a particularly flexible approach. This means that it’s easier to only include the apt repository where necessary.

There is also a new aptly mirror – APTLY_MIRROR_GAZEBO – available which can be used to mirror the Gazebo packages that are often used with ROS2.

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 – 19/05/2025 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0