Release Notes

/releases/

The most recent release is first in this list:

  • 2020-02-17

    Release notes: UBOS Linux update 2020-02-17

    ##To upgrade

    To be safe, first create a backup of all your sites to a suitable file, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --all --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    What’s new

    New features

    • System logs are now written onto the UBOS Staff when booted while it is present. This makes troubleshooting of issues on devices that don’t have an associated keyboard or monitor much simpler.

    • UBOS now knows how to handle major Postgres updates automatically.

    • The Storj decentralized storage platform is now available on the UBOS “yellow” release channel. Storj provides functionality similar to Amazon Web Services’ S3, but instead of sending your data to somebody else’s cloud, Storj breaks it down into small, encrypted pieces and stores them on computers owned by users like you. You can also offer part of your own disk to other users, all at prices that are lower than S3.

    Notable new packages:

    • Arduino command-line tools
    • Platform.io command-line tools

    Package upgrades:

    Over 600 packages were upgraded.

    Bug fixes

    The usual: fixed bugs and made improvements. You can find the closed issues on Github tagged with milestone ubos-21.

    Known problems

    If you receive a message about “unknown trust” when installing a package or updating your system, see Installing a new Package or upgrading fails with a message about “unknown trust”.

  • 2019-11-12

    Release notes: apps update 2019-11-12

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first create a backup of all your sites to a suitable file, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    What’s new

    Package upgrades:

    • Matomo has been upgraded to 3.12.0

    • Mattermost has been upgraded to 5.15.2

    • Mediawiki has been upgraded to 1.33.1

    • Nextcloud has been upgraded to 17.0.1. Also, the following accessories were upgraded or newly added:

      • nextcloud-audioplayer
      • nextcloud-bookmarks
      • nextcloud-cache-redis
      • nextcloud-calendar
      • nextcloud-contacts
      • nextcloud-deck
      • nextcloud-files-rightclick
      • nextcloud-group-everyone
      • nextcloud-groupfolders
      • nextcloud-mail
      • nextcloud-markdown
      • nextcloud-news
      • nextcloud-notes
      • nextcloud-onlyoffice
      • nextcloud-passwords
      • nextcloud-social
      • nextcloud-socialsharing-email
      • nextcloud-socialsharing-facebook
      • nextcloud-socialsharing-twitter
      • nextcloud-spreed
      • nextcloud-tasks
      • nextcloud-text
      • nextcloud-twofactor-totp

    • The package nextcloud16 was added. nextcloud15 was upgraded.

    • Shaarli has been upgraded to 0.11.1

    • Wordpress has been upgraded to 5.2.4. Also, the following accessories were upgraded or newly added:

      • wordpress-plugin-classic-editor
      • wordpress-plugin-google-analytics-for-wordpress
      • wordpress-plugin-indieauth
      • wordpress-plugin-indieweb-post-kinds
      • wordpress-plugin-semantic-linkbacks
      • wordpress-plugin-seo
      • wordpress-plugin-simple-location
      • wordpress-plugin-social-networks-auto-poster-facebook-twitter-g
      • wordpress-plugin-webmention
      • wordpress-plugin-wp-mail-smtp
      • wordpress-theme-responsive

    New features

    Those apps that may send e-mail now automatically activate a local, outgoing e-mail server (postfix). However, you may need to work around your internet service provider to actually get mail out from your home network: see Reliably send e-mail via Amazon Web Services’ Simple E-mail Service: amazonses.

    Bug fixes

    The usual: fixed bugs and made improvements. You can find the closed issues on Github tagged with milestone ubos-apps-20.

    Known problems

    In one instance, a Matomo upgrade failed with Error in Matomo: Mysqli prepare error: Access denied for user ... to database .... This problem goes away if the Goals plugin is disabled (go to Administration / System / Plugins).

    Note on skipped Nextcloud major version upgrades

    If you have not upgraded your UBOS device running Nextcloud for a while, the Nextcloud upgrader may not be able to upgrade your installation in one go. As a workaround, we have introduced packages nextcloud16 and nextcloud15, which contain Nextcloud version 16 and 15, respectively. You can use these packages as an intermediate step to upgrade from an earlier Nextcloud to the current version. This is described in more detail in :doc:/users/apps/nextcloud.

  • 2019-10-10

    Release notes: UBOS Linux update 2019-10-10

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first create a backup of all your sites to a suitable file, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --all --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    Please refer to the main documentation for details.

    Notable changes

    This is mostly a package upgrade release with some small bug fixes and additions to the documentation.

    • More than 500 packages have been upgraded or newly added.

    • The Arch installation instructions for developers have been updated to cover UEFI-only PCs.

    Note

    On the ESPRESSObin, you need to update your boot loader, otherwise booting your system will fail. This is newly documented at Run UBOS on ESPRESSObin.

  • 2019-09-01

    Release notes: UBOS Linux update 2019-09-01

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first create a backup of all your sites to a suitable file, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --backuptodirectory ~

    (Note that after this update, you also need to specify --all; see below.)

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    Please refer to the main documentation for details.

    New and improved functionality for users:

    • Command ubos-admin status has become much more useful, for users to determine the health of their device, and to make customer support simpler. Specifically:

      • by default, it shows a summary of all there is to know about the device, such as the type of the device, which disks are attached, how much space is used on those disks, when the device was last updated, and whether there are any known problems with the device.

      • optional flags (such as --problems) allow to easily zoom into specific areas.

    • Backups have become faster, as UBOS now applies a heuristic on which files to compress and which to use as-is in the backup file, as some file formats are compressed already.

    • Integration with the LetsEncrypt certificate authority has been significantly improved, and various bugs have been fixed:

      • When we tested a LetsEncrypt-protected site running on UBOS with the tools provided by SSL Labs, we obtained an “A” rating. All other LetsEncrypt-protected sites running on UBOS should, too, after this upgrade.

      • When backing up a LetsEncrypt-protected site, it can be easily restored to a different hostname: UBOS will automatically obtain a certificate for the new hostname.

      • When undeploying LetsEncrypt-protected sites, UBOS now stashes still-valid certificates, and reuses them when such a Site is redeployed on the same device. This avoids running into rate-limiting features by LetsEncrypt that you may encounter when performing many systems administration tasks in a rapid sequence, for example.

      • UBOS will not use an expired LetsEncrypt certificate to deploy a Site, or to restore a Site from backup; instead it will provision a new one.

      • Renewal of expiring certificates is now in-place, requiring no more manual steps.

      • UBOS now also automatically serves intermediate LetsEncrypt certs.

    • Integration with Pagekite for accessing a UBOS device behind a firewall has been further improved:

      • Pagekite secrets can now be specified interactively.

      • Wildcard sites are now supported.

    • Backing up with ubos-admin backup has been improved:

      • Either the Site(s) or --all must be specified when backing up. This avoids the frequent user mistake of accidentally backing up all Sites on a multi-Site device by forgetting to specify which Site (only) was supposed to be backed up.

      • The new --resolve flag, inherited from curl, makes backing up over the network without official DNS entries (e.g. on a home LAN) much simpler.

      • The upload to a network destination phase of ubos-admin backup (after the backup to a local file stage is complete) no longer prevents the invocation of other ubos-admin commands.

    • ubos-admin showsite has learned new tricks:

      • with argument --adminuser, information about the Site administrator is shown. This makes it easy to find out, for example, what the administrator username and password is for a deployed app like Nextcloud.

      • Credentials and private customizationpoint values are not shown any more default. To see them, you need to explicitly specify argument --credentials or --privatecustomizationpoints.

    • ubos-admin showappconfig now also shows which Site the AppConfiguration belongs to.

    • ubos-admin deploy --template can now automatically generate self-signed certificates if an empty "tls" : {} is provided in the Site JSON template.

    • ubos-admin listsites --html emits HTML.

    • ubos-admin createsite can now use a Site JSON template file as a template, and will ask the user only about those values that aren’t already provided.

    • ubos-install will refuse to install to a mounted disk. However, it will now install to the target of a symbolic link. This makes installations more predictable by supporting destinations such as below /dev/disk/by-path.

    • The UBOS Staff now lists the devices first that were most recently updated.

    • Logging in via ssh now presents the UBOS banner.

    • The VirtualBox image is now larger.

    • UBOS boots without the quiet kernel option. For the UBOS use cases, seeing more information during boot is better rather than less.

    • The output of some ubos-admin commands, such as ubos-admin showsite has become more concise; additional flags make it more verbose.

    • Improved progress messages.

    • Various documentation improvements.

    New and improved functionality for developers:

    • Apps can now require TLS by saying so in the UBOS Manifest. This makes it impossible to deploy the App to a Site not protected by (official, or self-signed) TLS.

    • Customizationpoints can now be of type float in addition to the previously available types.

    • Customizationpoints can be marked as internal, and if so, will not be shown to the user by default. That reduces user confusion and improves security related to customizationpoints such as password salts, or Redis credentials.

    • Systemd service smtp-server@<appconfigid>.service is now available so that apps that require a local SMTP service can say so without interfering with each other.

    • A defined conflict resolution strategy has been implemented for when two apps deployed to the same Site request the same entries in the Site’s .well-known directory; depending on the entry, one takes preference over another, or the entries are merged.

    • The generic Role in the UBOS manifest may now specify depends entries.

    • By default, PHP allows access to both /tmp and /ubos/tmp.

    • The default Mariadb encoding is now utf8mb4.

    • The webapptest testing framework has new abilities:

      • Flag --tlsselfsigned runs the test over TLS with an automatically-generated, self-signed TLS certificate.

      • webapptest can now use Site JSON templates.

    • pacsane now accepts relative path names.

    Notable fixes:

    • Some networks have slow DNS servers, and that has caused some iptables restarts to fail. This has been made more robust.

    • Upgrades of deployed sites, or restores from backup now install new role dependencies declared in the manifest. They were previously ignored.

    • Pagekite now works with wildcard Sites.

    • WPA supplicant files are generated more defensively for higher user success with specifying WiFi credentials with the UBOS Staff.

    Changes in shipped packages:

    • The Apache webserver was upgraded.

    • We only ship Node LTS, no other Node versions.

    • Monero was removed.

    • We removed the ruby-rails-blog example application for Ruby on Rails; decko is better, real-world example.

    • Each device class supported by UBOS has a pre-installed specific package, such as ubos-deviceclass-pc.

    • A patched version of LetsEncrypt test Certificate Authority pebble ships in os-experimental. It issues certificates with a very short expiration time, to help with testing.

    Application updates:

    There were minor updates to the following apps:

    • Decko
    • Matomo
    • Mediawiki
    • Nextcloud
    • phpBB
    • Wordpress

  • 2019-07-23

    Release notes: apps update 2019-07-23

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first create a backup of all your sites to a suitable file, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    What’s new

    New functionality:

    • If you have not upgraded your UBOS device running Nextcloud for a while, the Nextcloud upgrader may not be able to upgrade your installation in one go. As a workaround, we have introduced package nextcloud15, which contains Nextcloud version 15. You can use this package as an intermediate step to upgrade from an earlier Nextcloud to the current version. This is described in more detail in Notes on Nextcloud.

    • If you redeploy your Site running Nextcloud with a different administrator password than originally, the Nextcloud installation will be updated with the new admin password. This makes for an effective admin password reset.

    Package upgrades:

    • Mediawiki has been upgraded to 1.33.0

    • Nextcloud has been upgraded to 16.0.3. Also, the following accessories were upgraded or newly added:

      • nextcloud-audioplayer
      • nextcloud-auto-mail-accounts
      • nextcloud-bookmarks
      • nextcloud-bruteforcesettings
      • nextcloud-contacts
      • nextcloud-deck
      • nextcloud-groupfolders
      • nextcloud-mail
      • nextcloud-notes
      • nextcloud-onlyoffice
      • nextcloud-passwords
      • nextcloud-social
      • nextcloud-spreed
      • nextcloud-tasks
      • nextcloud-twofactor-totp

    • Wordpress has been upgraded to 5.2.2. Also, the following accessories were upgraded or newly added:

      • wordpress-plugin-google-analytics-for-wordpress
      • wordpress-plugin-indieauth
      • wordpress-plugin-indieweb-post-kinds
      • wordpress-plugin-micropub
      • wordpress-plugin-semantic-linkbacks
      • wordpress-plugin-seo
      • wordpress-plugin-social-networks-auto-poster-facebook-twitter-g
      • wordpress-plugin-syndication-links
      • wordpress-plugin-webmention
      • wordpress-plugin-wp-mail-smtp
      • wordpress-theme-responsive
      • wordpress-theme-twentyfifteen
      • wordpress-theme-twentyfourteen
      • wordpress-theme-twentythirteen
      • wordpress-theme-twentytwelve

    Bug fixes

    The usual: fixed bugs and made improvements. You can find the closed issues on Github tagged with milestone ubos-apps-19.

  • 2019-05-09

    Release notes: apps update 2019-05-09

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first create a backup of all your sites to a suitable file, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    What’s new

    New functionality:

    • When redeploying a site that runs Nextcloud with a changed site administrator password, the site administrator password will be changed on the Nextcloud administrator account. This simplifies administrator password reset.

    Package upgrades:

    • Nextcloud has been upgraded to version 16. From the release notes: It “… introduces machine learning to detect suspicious logins and offering clever recommendations. Group Folders now sport access control lists so system administrators can easily manage who has access to what in organization-wide shares. There are also Projects, a way to easily relate and find related information like files, chats or tasks.”

    • The following Nextcloud accessories were upgraded:

      • nextcloud-bookmarks
      • nextcloud-calendar
      • nextcloud-contacts
      • nextcloud-deck
      • nextcloud-group-everyone
      • nextcloud-groupfolders
      • nextcloud-mail
      • nextcloud-markdown
      • nextcloud-news
      • nextcloud-notes
      • nextcloud-onlyoffice
      • nextcloud-passwords
      • nextcloud-spreed

    • mediawiki upgrade to 1.32.1, and corresponding mediawiki-ext-confirmaccount upgrade

    • Minor decko upgrade

    • Wordpress has been upgraded to version 5.1.1.

    • The following Wordpress accessories were upgraded:

      • wordpress-plugin-google-analytics-for-wordpress
      • wordpress-plugin-indieauth
      • wordpress-plugin-indieweb-post-kinds
      • wordpress-plugin-micropub
      • wordpress-plugin-pterotype
      • wordpress-plugin-seo
      • wordpress-plugin-social-networks-auto-poster-facebook-twitter-g
      • wordpress-plugin-syndication-links
      • wordpress-plugin-wp-mail-smtp

    Fixes:

    • Removed duplicate Referer-Policy header for Nextcloud
    • Added iconv dependency for Selfoss
    • Added gd dependency for Shaarli
    • Added files for some functionality in Webtrees

    Known issues

    • ubos-admin status emits some (harmless) errors under some circumstances.

    • Running Pagekite with ubos-admin start-pagekite on a device that runs a wildcard site (ie a site whose hostname was specified as *) may not forward the traffic correctly. Redeploy the site with its public hostname instead.

  • 2019-04-03

    Release notes: UBOS Linux update 2019-04-03 (green channel)

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first create a backup of all your sites to a suitable file, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --out ~/XXX.ubos-backup

    If you have any of the following packages installed, remove them:

    • sudo pacman -R smespath botocore amazons3

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    Warning

    Before upgrading on Amazon EC2, you need to update your instance’s kernel command line, otherwise the instance will fail to connect to the network upon reboot. Details see below.

    What’s new

    New functionality:

    • ubos-admin is now in color! (On terminals that support it.) That makes entering the correct information in commands such as ubos-admin createsite visually much simpler. It also makes it easier to distinguish between informational messages and errors emitted by ubos-admin.

    • A new design for backups has been implemented. This means that the command syntax for backups has changed slightly. It also means backups have become much more flexible, powerful and open to new protocols. In more detail:

      • The command ubos-admin backup now either takes the argument --backuptofile <file> or --backuptodir <dir>. The argument --out <file> has been removed. If a file is specified, the backup will be written to the file with that name. If a directory is specified, UBOS generates a filename for the backup, and saves the backup with that file name in the specified directory.

      • <file> and <directory> can be specified as local files and directories, but they can also have a URL-style protocol in front. For example, using --backuptofile with scp://user@example.com/mybackup.ubos-backup will cause UBOS to upload the backup to file mybackup.ubos-backup on host example.com, transferred using the scp protocol as remote user user.

      • To see which URL-style protocols are available on your device, run the (new) command ubos-admin list-data-transfer-protocols. The following protocols have been implemented so far: file (local files), ftp (traditional ftp), http (upload by HTTP POST or PUT), https (upload by HTTPS POST or PUT), scp (secure remote file copy), and sftp (secure ftp).

      • In addition, if you installed optional package ubos-datatransfer-rsync, you will also get rsync+ssh (rsync over ssh transport). If you install optional package amazons3, you will also get s3 (upload to Amazon Web Services S3).

      • The command ubos-admin backup-to-amazon-s3 has been removed, as the functionality is now handled by the normal ubos-admin backup with an s3: protocol.

      • If credentials are required for uploading a backup, UBOS will ask you for those credentials on the first time you run backup with a particular protocol to a particular destination. When you run the backup the second time, by default, UBOS will reuse the credentials you provided earlier. The same applies to many protocol-specific options, such as the “passive” option for ftp. These options are stored by destination, so if you regularly back up to two different destinations but with the same protocol (e.g. two different S3 buckets, or two ftp sites), UBOS will use the flags for that specific destination. This makes regular backups much simpler because you don’t have to remember the options that are needed for upload, or the specific credentials.

      • Regardless of destination or protocol, backups can now be encrypted simply by specifying the GPG encryption key to use with --encryptid <id>. By default, the GPG key chain of the shepherd user is used, but you can specify an alternate GPG home directory.

      • As you probably guessed from the above, under the hood, UBOS now implements a plugin architecture for “data transfer protocols” and knows how to perform backup over any such provided plugin. This makes it easy for us (and for you!) to plug-in additional data transfer protocols.

    • The command-line arguments for ubos-admin backupinfo and ubos-admin listsites have been made consistent.

    • ubos-admin createsite now requires that the administrator e-mail address uses a fully-qualified domain name (well, it needs to have at least one dot). This seemed to be the easiest solution to the problem that some apps (like Nextcloud) do not accept user e-mail addresses that refer to local hostnames without domain names.

    • ubos-admin createsite now requires administrator passwords that are at least 8 characters long.

    • During ubos-admin update, UBOS will now temporarily store exported database content in compressed form. This reduces the need for extra disk space during upgrades. Also, the restore algorithm was improved for higher speed in case of large databases.

    • During system upgrades with ubos-admin update, it is unavoidable that sites are temporarily unavailable. However, the duration during which they are unavailable has been reduced.

    • If you have a separate /ubos partition and it is formatted with btrfs, ubos-admin update will now also automatically snapshot that partition.

    • ubos-admin status output is now more readable.

    • There were a set of intermittent issues related to LetsEncrypt certificates, either with or without running Pagekite. The provisioning of LetsEncrypt certificates has been rewritten. Among other changes, UBOS now keeps valid LetsEncrypt certificates around, even if a site at the corresponding hostname has been undeployed. This avoids running into throttling problems with LetsEncrypt during certain system administration tasks.

    Notable new packages:

    New apps:

    • Matomo, an analytics application (formerly named Piwik)
    • Decko, an innovative Wiki platform (formerly named Wagn)

    New accessories for Nextcloud:

    • nextcloud-bruteforcesettings: protect Nextcloud servers from attempts to guess user passwords in various ways
    • nextcloud-deck: kanban style organization tool aimed at personal planning and project organization for teams integrated with Nextcloud
    • nextcloud-files-rightclick: allows users and developers to have a right click menu
    • nextcloud-group-everyone: adds a virtual “Everyone” group.
    • nextcloud-groupfolders: admin configured folders shared by everyone in a group
    • nextcloud-passwords: allows you to store your passwords safely with Nextcloud
    • nextcloud-socialsharing-email: enable direct sharing of files via email, using shared links
    • nextcloud-socialsharing-facebook: enable direct sharing of files via Facebook, using shared links
    • nextcloud-socialsharing-twitter: enable direct sharing of files via Twitter, using shared links.

    New accessories for Wordpress:

    • Pterotype and SEO

    Other packages;

    • The GNU debugger: gdb
    • The PHP debugger: xdebug
    • The Node version manager: nvm
    • IPFS: go-ipfs

    Notable package upgrades:

    • Docroot
    • Mediawiki and accessories
    • Nextcloud and accessories
    • Wordpress and accessories

    There were approx 400 new or upgraded packages in total.

    Fixes and improvements:

    • Various backup/restore issues were fixed. These had impacted primarily sites running Shaarli and Selfoss.
    • Nextcloud installations now set the admin e-mail address automatically
    • Nextcloud now shows memory info
    • DNSSEC is turned off by default for new installations, as it appears to be incompatible with many deployed DNS servers that don’t support it.
    • Resolves a character-set issue sporadically producing errors in the Nextcloud user interface.

    Changes for developers:

    • Apps based on Node now need to package their own node runtime. More info is in the documentation </docs-yellow/developers/middleware-notes/nodejs.html>_.

    Removed functionality

    • Nextcloud has been removed from the armv6h architecture. The Raspberry Pi Zero and One are simply not powerful enough to run Nextcloud, so there is no point.

    Known issues

    • ubos-admin status emits some (harmless) errors under some circumstances.

    • If upgrading, if some packages are installed, they need to be uninstalled first: sudo pacman -R smespath botocore amazons3

    • Running Pagekite with ubos-admin start-pagekite on a device that runs a wildcard site (ie a site whose hostname was specified as *) may not forward the traffic correctly. Redeploy the site with its public hostname instead.

    • On Amazon EC2, the kernel command-line needs to be updated prior to an upgrade. Here are the steps:

      #. As root, edit file /etc/default/grub. Look for the line (towards the beginning of the file) that starts with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. Change the line to read:

      GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset console=ttyS0,9600n8 earlyprintk=serial,ttyS0,9600,verbose loglevel=7 init=/usr/lib/systemd/systemd"

      Save the file.

      #. As root, execute: grub-install --recheck /dev/xvda

      #. As root, execute: grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

      #. Now perform the update with: sudo ubos-admin update

  • 2019-04-02

    Release notes: apps update 2019-04-02 (yellow channel)

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first create a backup of all your sites to a suitable file, with a command such as:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    What’s new

    Notable new packages:

    Several new Nextcloud “apps” are now available on UBOS:

    • nextcloud-bruteforcesettings: protect Nextcloud servers from attempts to guess user passwords in various ways
    • nextcloud-deck: kanban style organization tool aimed at personal planning and project organization for teams integrated with Nextcloud
    • nextcloud-files-rightclick: allows users and developers to have a right click menu
    • nextcloud-group-everyone: adds a virtual “Everyone” group.
    • nextcloud-groupfolders: admin configured folders shared by everyone in a group
    • nextcloud-passwords: allows you to store your passwords safely with Nextcloud
    • nextcloud-socialsharing-email: enable direct sharing of files via email, using shared links
    • nextcloud-socialsharing-facebook: enable direct sharing of files via Facebook, using shared links
    • nextcloud-socialsharing-twitter: enable direct sharing of files via Twitter, using shared links.

    Package upgrades:

    • nextcloud
    • nextcloud-bookmarks
    • nextcloud-contacts
    • nextcloud-news
    • nextcloud-onlyoffice

    There were 14 new or upgraded packages in total.

    Fixes and improvements:

    • Resolves a character-set issue sporadically producing errors in the Nextcloud user interface.

    Known issues

    • ubos-admin status emits some (harmless) errors under some circumstances.

    • Running Pagekite with ubos-admin start-pagekite on a device that runs a wildcard site (ie a site whose hostname was specified as *) may not forward the traffic correctly. Redeploy the site with its public hostname instead.

  • 2019-03-29

    Release Notes: update 2019-03-29 (yellow channel)

    To upgrade

    To be safe, first create a backup of all your sites to a suitable file:

    • sudo ubos-admin backup --backuptodirectory ~

    Then, update your device:

    • sudo ubos-admin update -v

    Warning

    Before upgrading on Amazon EC2, you need to update your instance’s kernel command line, otherwise the instance will fail to connect to the network upon reboot. Details see below.

    What’s new

    Package upgrades:

    • Nextcloud
    • Mastodon
    • Wordpress
    • Linux is now at kernel version 5.0.x (x86_64 only for now)
    • Mariadb is now at 10.3.x
    • Bitcoin daemon
    • Ethereum daemon

    There were several hundred package upgrades in total.

    Notable new packages:

    • Matomo, an analytics application (formerly named Piwik)
    • The GNU debugger: gdb
    • The PHP debugger: xdebug
    • The Node version manager: nvm
    • IPFS: go-ipfs
    • More Wordpress plugins, such as Pterotype and SEO

    Fixes and improvements:

    • Various backup/restore issues were fixed. These had impacted primarily sites running Shaarli and Selfoss.
    • Nextcloud installations now set the admin e-mail address automatically
    • Nextcloud now shows memory info
    • DNSSEC is turned off by default, as it appears to be incompatible with many deployed DNS servers that don’t support it.

    Changes for developers:

    • Apps based on Node now need to package their own node runtime. More info is in the /docs/developers/middleware-notes/nodejs.md.

    Removed functionality

    • Mastodon has been (temporarily) removed from the ARM architectures.

    Other

    • To find which issues have been closed as part of this release, search the Github repos for milestones ubos-18 and ubos-apps-18.

    • The Personal Public License has had some clarifying edits. See post.

    Known issues

    • ubos-admin status emits some (harmless) errors under some circumstances.

    • Running Pagekite with ubos-admin start-pagekite on a device that runs a wildcard site (ie a site whose hostname was specified as *) may not forward the traffic correctly. Redeploy the site with its public hostname instead.

    • On Amazon EC2, the kernel command-line needs to be updated prior to an upgrade. Here are the steps:

      1. As root, edit file /etc/default/grub. Look for the line (towards the beginning of the file) that starts with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. Change the line to read:

        GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset console=ttyS0,9600n8 earlyprintk=serial,ttyS0,9600,verbose loglevel=7 init=/usr/lib/systemd/systemd"

        Save the file.

      2. As root, execute: grub-install --recheck /dev/xvda

      3. As root, execute: grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

      4. Now perform the update with: sudo ubos-admin update