Mostly DICE changes again this week, but there are some helpful tweaks to the behaviour of the network component for those who use bonded interfaces. Here are the details of the notable changes…

Network configuration

The LCFG network component will no longer include any ipaddr or gateway settings for interfaces that have been bonded, those must be applied to the bond0 interface instead. The component will warn if it has to ignore those resources. This helps to avoid generating a broken netplan config.

All the DICE wire headers now specify the gateway address with the DEFAULT_GATEWAY macro. On nearly all managed subnets, that is the VRRP address for the core switches on that site.

We are currently working towards eradicating rdisc, to get ahead you can do this yourself by specifying the DICE_NO_RDISC macro at the top of an LCFG profile. Once rdisc is removed, all network configurations will require a static default route in the netplan. For simple configurations (e.g. a desktop or a server with single interface or standard bonding configuration) this will all be done automatically. For more complex configurations (e.g. KVM servers or other situations where VLANs and bridges are required), you may have to do some manual work. The standard KVM bridge macros have been modified appropriately.

We have discovered that it is important to only set the IP address and gateway on the “top most” interface for any stack. So if you have 2 interfaces (e.g. eth0, eth1) that are combined to create a bonded interface (e.g. bond0) and there is a bridge on top of that (e.g. br0), then only the bridge should have an address or gateway. You can avoid the IP address being set on an interface in the netplan by setting the LCFG ipaddr resource to none. For example:

!network.interfaces     mADD(br0)
network.hostname_br0    
network.netmask_br0     255.255.255.0
network.gateway_br0     DEFAULT_GATEWAY
network.type_br0        Bridge
network.delay_br0       0
network.stp_br0 off
/* Bridge on bond0 */
network.bridge_bond0    br0
!network.ipaddr_bond0   mSET(none)
!network.gateway_bond0  mSET()

Logging

On DICE Ubuntu systems following the develop release, the connection to the central log server is now using TLS. If this causes any problems it can be reverted to a standard tcp connection with the RSYSLOG_NO_TLS macro. If we don’t encounter any major problems this will become the standard configuration for all DICE machines at the end of April.

Dell System Updater

On DICE, there is now a /usr/local/sbin/dsu.proxy script which can be used to manually run dsu on machines that need to go via a web proxy. The weekly compliance checks will now use that script on all systems, it doesn’t do any harm on systems where it’s not essential and it ensures that the checks succeed.

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 – 23/03/2026 / LCFG Project by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0