MPU Meeting Thursday 1st October 2020

Ubuntu Focal Port of LCFG Platform

This project is now, finally, coming towards a conclusion as more of the work is becoming better classified as "operational" or "misc development". Stephen will begin to work on the final report.

imagemagick

The new imagick component will be enabled in the next stable release.

sh link

The /bin/sh link now points to bash rather than dash which should more closely match user expectations.

openafs 1.8.6

This is now on stable machines, some of them probably still need a reboot. At some point we should investigate why we get a kernel oops on reboot from the openafs scripts.

Misc Development

virtual dice

Alastair reckons the new ubuvdice profile is now in good enough shape to pass onto RAT. At some point we should put some effort into the branding but it's not urgent.

dsu

Chris has been working on updating dsu to 1.9. There are new public keys which, annoyingly, need to be manually accepted which breaks our automated usage. Chris will announce to COs once it has reached the stable release and warn them about the need to do a manual acceptance.

virtualbox

Stephen is working on providing virtualbox for Ubuntu. It looks fairly straightforward as most of our current configuration can be ignored, it looks like it's either old and unnecessary or only applies to the Oracle packages. We need to provide a dkms-generated kernel module package and something which ships the extension pack rather than just fetching it via wget.

lab checks

The config was updated for the latest Ubuntu kernel and the switch to 20.04.1 minor release. To reduce the number of incorrect items in the report Stephen will add support for a DICE_NO_CHECK macro which can be added to an LCFG profile, this will be useful for podium machines and printers which are in the labs. Chris suggested adding a test for ssh access, Stephen will look into how the nagios check script does that.

Operational

auditreports

The auditreport scripts are broken on Ubuntu, Stephen suspects a memory leak in the auditd python libraries which is exacerbated by the way the scripts were written. They will need a rewrite so the reports have been removed for now.

reaping xrdp logs

The chanserv log reaper seems to be working so Stephen has changed the cron job so that it no longer mails out a list of files removed.

External package access

External hosts can now be given access to the inf package buckets for Ubuntu using a file.v_extra_trusted_hosts resource. This is particularly useful for the xrdp hosts which are running on the IS virtualisation service.

XRDP service

The large memory server on the IS virtualisation service is now ready for action. We will announce this to COs and ask them to test it. Before it goes live we need a hole in the IS firewall hole, Alastair will start that process today, not sure how long it will take. We need to think about how we redistribute users onto the additional machine without affecting existing sessions.

sar resource monitoring

We need to get the sar monitoring working on Ubuntu. Alastair wants to make this into a proper service which includes support for self-managed machines.

piano

Stephen will finish commissioning the new KVM server this week.

XRDP servers

Chris will reinstall vermelha as an SL7 XRDP host with the alias sl7.xrdp. That will allow us to move ahead with upgrading the staff server and junking waterloo.

nessie

We spotted that the Ubuntu packages server is on the develop release, Stephen will get it back onto stable.

weekly testing

Chris will hand off the weekly Ubuntu testing to the Support Unit.

trello

We should all check our trello boards and tidy them up so we can start using them again.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Wednesday 14th October, we will discuss future project work.

-- StephenQuinney - 02 Oct 2020