LCFG Deployers' Monthly Meetings 2018

The meetings are typically held on the first Thursday of each month, starting at 2.15pm in the Informatics Forum room 1.15 THIS IS NOT THE SAME ROOM AS 2017. Notes after the meetings are added in italic to the agenda items. See MonthlyMeetings2017 and MonthlyMeetings2016 for notes from earlier meetings.

We aim to review any Recent bugs

1st November 2018

• LCFG core speed-up work
• ksu/kswitch with in-memory credentials caches
• gluster versus sgeadmin UID/GID problem
• Withdrawing Scientific Linux 7.3 support
• New IS slave servers (is https://bugs.lcfg.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115 still open and if so, can it be fixed?)
• AnnualReview2018
• Alternatives to NoMachine / NX Server (?)
• Withdrawl of Mac OS support - how to retain history of components and their headers

4th October 2018

• EL8 jottings
• ELK stack
• XML profile URL rewriting
• New lcfg/hw/hp_elitedesk800g4_mini.h
• cron component - ACL improvements
• Annual Review meeting - Thursday 6th December
• Auth component defaults, e.g. systemdnetwork and systembusproxy users in auth.extrapasswd in MDP layer
• xrdp - keyboard mapping issues ?
• systemd logging to console

6th September 2018

• k5login component now in lcfg headers
• Python 3 packages
• lcfg/hw/hp_elitedesk800g3_mini.h includes support for NVME root disk
• HP G4 - next SelectPC
• Branching LCFG Build Tools
• IS Change Freeze
• Disabling repos in lcfg-yummy
• 7.4 support
• sleep with latest kernel
• NaturalDocs problem

2nd August 2018

• End of support for SL6

5th July 2018

• SL7.5
• UEFI support
• GSSAPI auth for lcfg client

7th June 2018

apacheconf

Various improvements, particularly new groups feature

UEFI

Dealing with machines which do not support legacy BIOS mode

NVM

Whether computers with NVM SSDs (such as some HP SelectPCs) can be supported in future?

mysql bug 906

mysqld not always ready when setting root password

http pxe

PXEBoot changes allow much faster initial network boot.

3rd May 2018

LCFG profile security

New project looking into various aspects of enhancing the security of the LCFG profile data.

Privacy

Restricting user access to data from last/w, dmesg, procfs

SL7.5

Should be released soon.

SL7.4

Currently testing large set of backported security updates - to join in use lcfg/options/test_updates.h

SL7.3

No more security updates

x509 component

With the change of emphasis to use systemd rather than components to control daemon lifecycles, it would be good to have the x509 component be able to restart/reload daemons via systemctl.

5th April 2018

LCFG profile security

New project looking into various aspects of enhancing the security of the LCFG profile data.

journald retention

Does anyone have any objection to the setting, at the LCFG level, of journald's MaxRetentionSec to 1 month by default (with a flag to permit disabling)?

commit hook

Could informatics borrow Kenny's svn pre-commit hook which does simple checks including cpp?

mock and networking

We discovered that with the switch to using nspawn for package builds there is no network access. This can break tests for some packages so the component now has support for enabling the rpmbuild_networking option. bug#1054

LCFG::Template

It is now possible to set an include path which is searched when a relative path is given for a template.

IS Change Freeze

...and the ISFREEZE release.

IS Recording Open Source contributions

May ask schools and other units for submissions.

1st March 2018

CANCELLED

1st February 2018

bugs

We 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.

Annual review 2017

the bits that we didn't cover

chatroom

We are going to switch to slack for the lcfg chatroom. Hopefully this will result in more people being involved and more useful discussions.

fstab and nvme

The fstab component cannot handle the partition naming scheme for nvme devices - bug#1025 - patch applied

LCFG server problems

Geosciences and Physics have recently had problems with the LCFG server which required a restart with empty caches - systemd config altered to start server later

v4 client

Current status of new client

python

3.6

pyngi

A python component framework

Component changes

Recent source changes

lightdm

various stuff...

grub2

Now starts after kernel component. Also calls Configure from Stop. grub config should always be correct for the next boot. bug#1026

kernel

Now only triggers a rebuild of the initramfs when dracut or systemd package changes. Ignores kernel package changes which are already handled by the post-install script for the package. Generally improved the way the initramfs is rebuilt so that errors are always caught. bug#1034

x509 / sixkts

Can now generate SSL certificates which contain Subject Alternative Name information.

4th January 2018

CANCELLED

-- squinney - 2017-12-12