Mostly minor changes this week, here are the notable details…

PAM environment module

The user_readenv option for the pam_env module is now considered deprecated due to various security issues. With that in mind we have disabled it by default in all the LCFG pam component resources. See this oss-security discussion for details.

aptly

The LCFG aptly component has been updated to ignore snapshot errors when the mirror has not been updated.

apt services

To minimise the noise, the apt-news.service and esm-cache.service systemd services for apt are now disabled by default on all Ubuntu platforms.

Dell System Updater (dsu)

On DICE Dell servers we run dsu on a weekly basis so that we can gather information on those needing firmware updates. We have found that occasionally this results in gigantic log files being created in the /usr/libexec/dell_dup directory. This is particularly bad since that directory is part of the root filesystem and the size of the files can completely fill the partition for small installs. We’ve made various unsuccessful attempts at tidying up the files using logrotate so we have now resorted to a simple cron job that just calls rm on any older dsu log files. The default location of the log directory has also been changed to be /var/log/dell/ which reduces the chances of overwhelming the root partition.

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 – 23/06/2025 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0