I am currently working on a major reworking of the auth component for Ubuntu (and all future platforms). I’ve written up some notes on how I propose it will behave. Please have a read through. I am planning to start implementing the changes fairly soon so shout now if you can see any glaring issues […]

As part of the Ubuntu port project I’ve recently been working on adding support for managing local package repositories using aptly. The major benefit of the switch to aptly is that we no longer lose old versions of packages from the Informatics repositories as soon as new versions are submitted. This allows us to follow […]

One of the most important parts of the support infrastructure for any DICE platform are our mirrors of various upstream package repositories. Along with the obvious advantage of saving bandwidth by not having ~1000 machines reliant on fetching updates directly from the upstream site this gives us a lot more control over what we have […]

This week I have been mainly focussed on preparing the PAM configuration required for DICE Ubuntu machines. Comprehending all the PAM config is always a bit of a brain-melting process, the syntax is horrid, the options are myriad and the potential for introducing a security hole is high. I’ve taken the chance to modernise parts […]

As more schools have become involved with the switch to Ubuntu it has become clear that the lag between the weekly stable LCFG release being made and it actually becoming available for MDP users is causing many problems and extra work. To overcome this issue we have begun creating a new daily snapshot release. This […]

As part of the initial Ubuntu investigation project last year I looked at Debian package repository management. At the time I wanted something simple which I could get going quickly so I set up our local package repository service using reprepro. It is reasonably easy to use but has one very annoying drawback which is […]

Base The base list for a platform is mostly just all the required, important and standard packages. On top of that are the packages necessary to satisfy the dependencies for the LCFG core and standard component along with utilities that administrators would expect to have available as standard on all machines. We are still working […]

For installing Ubuntu machines we use the Minimal netboot installer which is based on the Debian installer technology. This allows the preseeding of configuration options so that the install can be completed in a fully automated fashion without any user interaction. We have had LCFG support for this installer for a while now which allows […]

Previously the LCFG configuration management system has only supported Redhat-based platforms so porting to a Debian-based platform has involved extensive changes to our code base. At this point we are providing a prototype platform based on Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine). This project blog will follow progress on porting to the Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) long-term […]