LCFG Annual Review 2019

On Friday 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.

Projects

Profile Security

• Changes to LCFG client directory permissions - ProfileSecurity
• LCFG server - file permissions tweaked on resources which are copied via rsync
• LCFG client - rdxprof now controlled via systemd, component rewritten into Perl
• Improved support for fetching profiles using https
• GSSAPI authentication support for client profile fetching

Alternate Desktop

build tools

New commands - gendeb for creating debian/ metadata, devdeb and deb for building packages. Lots of changes to improve the standard CMake configuration so that it works correctly when the source and build directories are not the same.

Header improvements

Any resources which relate to file paths in the lcfg headers have been updated to use macros or references to sysinfo resources so that they are platform-independent.

LCFG client

can now read and write a YAML packages list.

Directory layout

Altered to be closer to FHS guidelines

apt component and apteryx

New support for the apt package manager.

Package repository management

reprepro and dput

pkgforge

Working on support for building packages using pbuilder

Components

Current status - UbuntuComponents

Still need:

• installer
• network component replacement
• fstab component replacement

Major Changes

ngeneric

• Rewrite of locking code - Less likely to leave stale lock files when an error occurs
• ng_umask resource - Can be used to improve default security of files generated by components. Currently optional, could we set a very secure default in the future?
• ng_tmpldir resource - No longer need to give full paths to templates if they are stored in the standard locations.
• ng_service resource - Can be used to specify the systemd service name (e.g. ssh v sshd depending on platform).

Build Tools

• Support for the GIT version control system - thanks to Kenny MacDonald and Justin Kasin.

updaterpms

• https support - thanks to Kenny MacDonald

pxeserver / pxeclient

• Various improvements so it's easier to boot from either UEFI or legacy

x509

• Let's Encrypt support improvements

hardware

• Configures systemd to load kernel modules at boot time

kernel

• Configures which kernel modules should be included in the initramfs

fstab

• Resolved issue where the installer had to be run twice for the partitioning to work correctly

apacheconf

• Warn rather than Error for issues related to inactive vhosts/modules

slurm

• Component for managing the cluster workload scheduler

Platforms

EL7

• Platform was upgraded to SL7.6
• We expect the next update to be SL7.8. We will aim to roll this out to Informatics machines at the start of June 2020 but will, hopefully, make it available for all LCFG users sometime in early Spring.

General Discussion

-- squinney - 2019-12-03