MPU Meeting Wednesday 6th January 2021

Ubuntu Focal Port of LCFG Platform

Stephen's going to write up the final report.

A bug in the installer code was fixed.

Stephen has been tackling network config problems: routing should now be far more reliable.

Move websites from HTTP to HTTPS

The real computing.help has still to be converted to the new config. The rest have been done.

User Security Training Materials

First draft of material written; Learn is next.

PGR computing

Alastair's going to work out costs for NX and for a VM server for PGR VMs.

Miscellaneous Development

Over the holiday Stephen imported all the LCFG machine profile sources into Subversion. He did them in batches of 1000 or so and it went reasonably smoothly. The next stage will be to adjust the access permissions.

Operational

XRDP servers

Alastair closed off access to most of them for the duration of the holidays. We'll need to get them back into normal service again soon. They'll all need a reboot to install the new xrdp software, followed by an x509 restart. If its firewall hole is there in time, we'll add vxrdppool3 to the pool.

Dodgy iDRAC firmware

Ian had a problem with iDRAC firmware version 4.40.00.00 for PE R440, R340 and R240. It seems to break IPMI support. We recommend that you don't upgrade your iDRAC to that version.

Mindstorms

Stephen has been working out a network configuration for the Mindstorms EV robotics kits.

PolicyKit

Although it had config in /etc and in /var, it only seems to use that in /var so Stephen's changed the component to write config to /var. This fixed a problem whereby staff weren't being allowed to reboot their DICE machines.

Upgrade deadline

We had set ourselves a deadline of Easter to get all the SL7 desktops upgraded to Ubuntu, but in view of the lockdown we'll need to extend that.

-- ChrisCooke - 11 Jan 2021