LCFG Annual Review 2018

On Thursday 6th December 2018 instead of our normal monthly Deployers Meeting we will be holding our traditional Annual Review session. This will start at 2pm and we aim to be finished by 5pm. This year it will be held in room 7.14 of the Appleton Tower. Refreshments will be provided including some seasonal treats.

All users of LCFG are encouraged to attend this meeting to hear about what has been happening over the last year and what developments they can look forwards to in the next year. This is also an excellent opportunity to raise issues that are important to you, put forward ideas for future developments you would like to see and chat about all things LCFG!

As is traditional the meeting will be followed by a social event and we will go for dinner somewhere. Even if you cannot attend the meeting in the afternoon you are very welcome to join us for the social event in the evening.

If you have any topics you are particularly keen to have discussed then please edit this page and add them to the General Discussion section below with a brief summary.

Core project

Developments continue...

Packages

Support for processing package lists including *.rpms files. Added basic support for categories.

Derivations

The handling of derivation information has been extensively reworked to improve performance when processing lists of packages (and to hopefully use less memory).

Resources

Reworked data structure used in components so that resources are hashed for much faster lookups.

nodename

Improved handling of the nodename in Perl with the introduction of the LCFG::Profile::NodeName class.

Component changes

apacheconf

New support for managing http groups. Improved support for listening on multiple addresses/ports.

fstab

New support for UEFI partition type.

grub2

New support for UEFI booting.

hackparts

New support for NVME drives and UEFI partition type.

kernel

Works harder to avoid unnecessary reboots.

ngeneric

Improved Kinit environment initialisation plugin. Now logs calling user for component methods when non-root. Better logrotate config generation.

om

New support for passing through (keeping) specific environment variables to the component.

pxeclient/pxeserver

New support for UEFI booting. Can now fetch kernel and initramfs files via http which should be much faster and more reliable.

x509

New support for SAN and letsencrypt.

Platforms

SL6

It's dead Jim...

EL7

This year has seen two minor releases - 7.5, 7.6. We are currently only supporting 7.5, we expect to add support for 7.6 in the LCFG layer sometime early next year.

Scientific Linux pushed out an enormous number of security updates, backported from 7.6, on Monday 26th November. Details are available in the scientific-linux-devel mailing list archive. This includes such delights as a rebase of Gnome to 3.28 and a major update for X.

The updates will be available for testing with the LCFG stable release on Wednesday 5th December. At that point, the updates can be enabled for individual machines using the lcfg/options/test_updates.h header which enables the LCFG_TEST_PACKAGES option. With the LCFG stable release on Wednesday 12th December they will be applied by default. MDP users will probably receive that release in early 2019.

EL8

The RHEL8 beta was released in November 2018 - https://access.redhat.com/products/red-hat-enterprise-linux/beta, it appears to be based on Fedora 28.

There is still the question of whether we use Centos or ScientificLinux for the next platform.

Thoughts are being collected at EL8PortHome

Upcoming Development

Work on improving the security of LCFG profile access is still ongoing. We now have support for GSSAPI authentication when fetching profiles from the server. We have also tightened up the permissions on the various files and directories used by the LCFG client, the main result of which is that users wanting to be able to run qxprof must be in the lcfg group. These features are ready for testing but not all are the default yet, they will be slowly introduced over the next few months.

General Discussion

Bugs

We really would like to see more bug reports! We all know about various bugs (whether trivial or important) or have features we would like to see. It would be very helpful if we could get these recorded. We can't promise they will get fixed but just having them in https://bugs.lcfg.org/ would be a great start. I propose that to make them more useful and improve response times at each monthly meeting we review all newly submitted bugs from the previous month.

-- squinney - 2018-10-31