LCFG SL5 Log

This is a log of ongoing work on the LCFG SL5 platform, the work during the initial porting was documented in a separate diary page.

Tue 13th May

• (Stephen) Added quite a few more i386 versions of libraries to the x86_64 platform so we can support applications like the Adobe flash plugin and Adobe Acrobat reader which seem to only come in 32bit form. Note, if you want to run Acrobat on the 64bit platform you will need something like:

!profile.packages               mEXTRA(AdobeReader_enu-8.1.2-1/i486\
                                                        i386/nss_ldap-253-5.el5 \
                                                        i386/bind-libs-9.3.3-10.el5 \
                                                        i386/openldap-2.3.27-8.el5_1.3 \
                                                        i686/openssl-0.9.8b-8.3.el5.2)

Monday 17th March

• (Stephen) Grabbed all security updates, including kernel update. This will be in the stable release on 27th March.

Friday 29th February

• (Stephen) Grabbed all security updates.
• (Stephen) Applied bits of Kenny's patch to add in the missing users and groups that we need in lcfg-defetc-sl5

Tuesday 26th February

• (Stephen) Last week I created new kernels for the SL5 32bit and 64bit install CDs using the latest kernel SRPMs from SL5.1. These should be able to boot on the Dell 755, Kenny did a quick test for me and it certainly appears to work fine. The new install CDs will be available as part of the stable release this Thursday.

Wednesday 20th February

• (Kenny) There was nothing wrong with the new PIE LCFG image. It was that I hadn't specified the hardware component settings (in particular the scsi_hostadapter alias). So I copied the resources from include/lcfg/hw/dell_optiplex_745.h and changed the NIC module from tg3 to e1000e. Now the i386 image boots fine!
• (Kenny) Managed to get a 64bit guest OS running inside VMware workstation on my Dell 745 and captured a PIE image. It boots wonderfully on the 755 too, but the second phase of PIE (the temporary 64bit version used to chroot) doesn't see the NIC. This is because PIE uses the e1000i module, but SL5 calls it e1000e. I'll fix this, probably by looking at the hardware component's setting for the NIC and adding that to the kernel command line - assuming PIE supports telling it which NIC to install. If it doesn't, then we'll need to make it so, since NeSC have a problem with Sun X4100 and X3100 servers with two NICs booting PIE.
• (Kenny) Wrote up a wiki page on how we do LCFG system imaging in PIE. Paul wanted something about system imaging, and it was time I documented what we did.
• (Kenny) Changed all 'minimal' builds to use the LCFG layer lcfg_sl5_kernel.rpms and lcfg_sl5_64_kernel.rpms packagelists instead of maintaining our own subset. The key difference is that we didn't have the PAE kernel in our i386 packagelist. Turns out PIE is happy creating an initrd for that kernel and the system image is only 20Mb or so bigger this way. Thanks to Stephen for making me think twice about requesting the PAE kernel and modules be split out into an option - it's not worth the work.

Tuesday 19th February

• (Kenny) Created a new PIE LCFG image, but it refused to boot on the Dell 755. It was made under VMware Workstation 6 which is working nicely on SL5. It also has the PAE kernel in it, which may be confusing PIE's image-build-lcfg script as it chroot's in and creates new initrd's for each installed kernel. Then again, it could just be that we require to use the hardware component to make sure the hard disk is seen on the 755. More testing tomorrow.

Monday 18th February

• (Kenny) Helped Michael to get up to speed with the CUPS component. He now has lots of print queues managed using it.

Friday 15th February 2008

• (Kenny) Pushed the 2008021101d release of SL5 out, and fully expect virtually all of the Open Access Lab machines to upgrade overnight now that they have a "boot into Linux" schedule. Will have to boot the Maths Labs myself in the meantime.
• (Kenny) Upgraded my Dell 754 to 4Gb RAM and installed VMwarePlayer via the LCFG option. Everything works perfectly! Bridged network worked for a cloned VM that James gave me. Tried installing VMwareWorkstation. Had to rename the RPM to get genhdfile to recognise it. It refused to install - lots of file conflicts with the player. After removing the player RPM, the workstation one still refused to install, with the pre-install script failing. I deleted /etc/vmware and was going to try again before getting distracted. The story will continue next week. I copied the VMwarePlayer RPM from the DICE bucket. But it was going to be installed by an option in the LCFG layer. Perhaps move both to the ed layer? Can we put VMwareWorkstation RPM in the same place?
• (Kenny) Got the LCD screen, wireless networking and NetworkManager working on my new Dell d430 laptop. I will move the required resources into a new hardware option file next week. The laptop didn't come back from a suspend, and it locked up hard when I removed it from the media dock, so still some work to do!

Thursday 14th February 2008

• (Kenny) Got my first ever RPM working! It's the Oracle Calendar Client. The SRPM doesn't contain the actual client but only the patches needed to make it install on modern Linuxes, a wrapper, shortcut and user profile which it sticks into a sub package (noarch) by running rpmbuild twice. I created an MDP option to install it on SL5 and Macs (as soon as I receive the package). Sent the URLs to Michael Gordon and asked him (and anyone else trying this) to contact Angie Lamb if you want changes made to it.

Wednesday 13th February 2008

• (Stephen) Pushed kernel updates into our "testing" branch, they will be part of the stable release on Thursday 14th February.

Monday 11th February 2008

• (Stephen) Added updates up to today to our "develop" branch.

Wednesday 30th January 2008

• (Kenny) Released a new version (2.1-1) of my lcfg-cups component which can configure /etc/cups/client.h.

Monday 28th January 2008

• (Stephen) Added the SL5.1 updates and new packages to the updates and postship lists.
• (Stephen) Added device-mapper-multipath to the SL5 installroot and installbase package lists.
• (Stephen) The sos / sysreport problem is already fixed in the SL5 base lists, also fixed is the conflict with yum-conf-5x.
• (Stephen) Did all security updates up to today, there's a new kernel version which will be in this week's stable release.

Saturday 26th January 2008

• (Kenny) Checked machine I left updating to SL5.1 last night. Conflict between yum-conf-5x from the base list and yum-conf-51 from the updates. I changed my local copy of lcfg_sl5_testupdates.rpms to remove sysreport. No more conflicts and only the glibc RPMs to upgrade at reboot. Rebooted and it all came back! My first SL5.1 box.
• (Kenny) Updated the geos test client to 5.1 straight from the mdpstable release (2008012101f) and had to uninstall xen, libvirt, gnome-applet-vm, libvirt-python, libvirt-devel, virt-manager and python-virtinst manually, even though they weren't listed in the profile. Is this something updaterpms should be doing?
• (Kenny) Updated a minimal client to SL5.1 and discovered that mkinitrd now requires device-mapper-multipath, which will probably have to be moved into lcfg_sl5_installbase.rpms and lcfg_sl5_installroot.rpms

Friday 25th January 2008

• (Kenny) We ran out of inodes on our svn server this morning. Whoops!
• (Kenny) I added some actions to the MonthlyMeetings2013 page.
• (Kenny) Copied the SL5.1 testupdate files to the MDP layer so I can test early - will remove again once they're released next week.
• (Kenny) I got conflicts between sos-1.7-9.1.el5 and sysreport-1.4.3-13.el5 (they both contain /usr/share/sysreport/functions). It seems that sysreport is being deprecated and the sos package should uninstall it (according to RHEL5 release notes. I changed my local copy of lcfg_sl5_testupdates.rpms to remove sysreport. No more conflicts!

Thursday 24th January 2008

• (Chris) Yesterday I created include/lcfg/os/sl5.h and include/lcfg/os/sl5_64.h.
• (Chris) Alastair followed up with include/diydice/os/sl5.h and include/diydice/os/fc6.h.

Tuesday 22nd January 2008

• (Stephen) I've created a page which documents the differences between SL 5.0 and 5.1 - Sl51Changes
• (Stephen) All xen related packages have been moved to separate package lists (lcfg/lcfg_sl5_xen.rpms and lcfg/lcfg_sl5_64_xen.rpms), they can be included using the new lcfg/options/xen.h header.

Friday 18th January 2008

• (Kenny) SL5.1 is out!
• (Kenny) Pointed out to Graham Dutton that SL5.1 comes with alpine. He says that should make things easier for him.
• (Kenny) Added a MonthlyMeetings2013 page to make sure we have stuff to talk about when the deployers' meeting takes place, and we don't forget to talk about everything. Does that count as an agenda?
• (Kenny) Released new CUPS component for testing (see MonthlyMeetings2013) for details.

Thursday 3rd January 2008

• (Stephen) Latest security updates for SL5.

Friday 7th December 2007

• (Stephen) Grabbed the latest security updates for SL5.
• (Stephen) A security update report has pointed out that xen must be upgraded only at the same time as the kernel. I've moved it into the kernel-related package list and marked it as boot-only. I also enabled the i386 version of xen-libs on x86_64 which involved pulling in glibc/i686 and zlib/i386

Tuesday 4th December 2007

• (Stephen) Grabbed the latest security updates for SL5. Looks like they have shipped a new version of krb5-libs (1.6.1) which is going to cause us some trouble. For now it is being ignored as we need to look into rebuilding our local version of openssh (and possibly other things).
• (Stephen) Also included is a kernel update, up to version 2.6.18-53.1.4.el5. We are ignoring the kmod-gnbd packages as there is not a new version for the latest kernel.

Tuesday 20th November 2007

• (Stephen) Added auto-built version of eucs-sslcerts to ed_sl5_env.rpms
• (Stephen) Built and added pidgin and missing dependencies to ed_sl5_env.rpms
• (Kenny) Spent some time looking for SL5.1 info. Found this which has the alpha release for i386.
• (Kenny) Moved my main managed box from FC6 to SL5 today. Had my home directory on the local partition and everything seems to be working as before!

Monday 19th November 2007

• (Stephen) Grabbed the latest security updates for SL5.
• (Stephen) Finally updated the SL5 kernel version to the latest version. If you are doing something odd and not running the new version of updaterpms this might cause you problems.

Monday 5th November 2007

• (Stephen) We are testing a new version of updaterpms. The way it handles packages marked as "boot-only" has been altered so that as well as only being installed at boot-time they are also now only removed at boot-time. This avoids problems with the way kernel module packages are named in SL5. All being well this will be included in the LCFG release on Thursday 15th November.

Thursday 1st November 2007

• (Kenny) Created kernel test MDP packagelists for i386 and i686 as well as an kerneltest.h option to replace the standard kernel packagelists with these test ones. The test kernel is missing the OpenAFS , FUSE and ipw3945 module packages, so the packagelists also remove any RPMs which depend on them. The kernel packages are at http://pie.ucs.ed.ac.uk/lcfg/rpms/mdp for now. I haven't noticed any problems (apart from the aforementiond missing functionality) on my limited use.
• (Kenny) Here are the RPMs the test kernel packagelists remove, fuse, fuse-smb, fuse-sshfs, ipw3945, openafs-server, openafs-client and openafs-compat.

Tuesday 30th October 2007

• (Stephen) Created the new log page
• (Stephen) Grabbed the latest security updates for SL5. For now the new kernel updates are commented out in lcfg_sl5_kernel.rpms and lcfg_sl5_64_kernel.rpms pending the arrival of the new version of updaterpms.

-- StephenQuinney - 30 Oct 2007