MPU Meeting Wednesday 9th December 2020

Ubuntu Focal Port of LCFG Platform

Stephen has mainly been working on porting the grub2 component to support Ubuntu. This is now ready for action and the package is included by default. The component will become active with the first stable release of 2021.

Stephen has trawled the LCFG headers for TODO markers and reviewed various chunks of config. Some of them are now applicable to Ubuntu, we will need to decide what to do with some others.

We hadn't added a password manager for Ubuntu so Stephen added keepassxc and Chris updated the computing.help docs.

The libreoffice breeze style package has been removed as it caused problems with icons. The default style is now colibre.

Virtualbox will be available on all Ubuntu machines from the first stable release of 2021.

When lab machines are next rebooted the power button will be configured to initiate a reboot for a short press of the button.

The Ubuntu packages service has now been moved from nessie to deneb. We can now decommission nessie.

Move websites from HTTP to HTTPS

Work on changing the computing.help site is ongoing. Some of the LCFG resource changes are isolated enough they can be integrated into the headers immediately. The rest will have to be kept in a separate chunk of mutations to be applied, once the conversion is done they can be merged into the headers.

User Security Training Materials

Chris has collected together lots of useful information, he's now working on how to finish off the work.

PGR computing

Bob Fisher is taking a proposal to the Strategy committee.

Miscellaneous Development

KVM pricing

Add disk space information to the KVM price spreadsheet.

GPU usage

Alastair had problems with DNS reverse lookups for IPv6 addresses on some machines.

procfs

Looks like the only way to specify mount options for /proc is through /etc/fstab, systemd .mount files don't allow it. This will have to wait until we port the fstab component.

Operational

staff XRDP

The staff XRDP server - archlute - has been upgraded to Ubuntu. We will hold on to the old server - waterloo - until RAT are happy that it's not needed, hopefully that will be fairly soon so we can decommission it at the same time as nessie.

firmware updates

Chris has done the LCFG slave vega

Staff SSH

This still needs upgrading to SL7.8, it will be done next Tuesday.

-- StephenQuinney - 15 Dec 2020