As part of the critical upgrade from SL7 to Ubuntu, we are replacing the core Linux routers serving each of our sites over the coming weeks. The Linux routers are our edge (and sometimes internal) firewalls as well as providing routing between our subnets and EdLAN, and onwards to the internet. They are connected to […]
This is for the attention of all those who have a self-managed computer (i.e. not MDP Windows or DICE Linux) using a wired network connection in either the Forum or Bayes Centre. This wired connection will be at risk next week – read on for details. Please be aware that we plan to replace the […]
For some years we’ve run a website called computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk. As the name may suggest, it contains advice and information about how to use the computers here in the School of Informatics. In fact, it’s the place to look for such information. In the old days, help for computer users was spread over a number of […]
Over the festive break, we will be running a “salvage” across all ourAFS file servers. This salvage is like an “fsck” (for those familiarwith that) that checks the consistency of the filesystem. It is estimated the salvaging will take 30 minutes to run per server,but it does depend on the volume of data on the […]
The Informatics mailing list service has been running for many years (decades). The move to Ubuntu has highlighted its age, and it is a bit of an oddity in terms of services that Informatics run (we shouldn’t be duplicating services that are provided centrally by the University). With this in mind we have started the […]
The School has been allocated £2M funding from the University to increase the cooling and power capacity of the Forum server room. This should allow us to add around 60 additional GPU servers. Completion of the project is expected early Q2 2025 and is starting this month (November). The project will build a large chiller […]
This is just a note to say that the School’s computing policies and guidelines, together with computing staff, strategy and governance information, can now be found at The Informatics Computing Hub. This is on Sharepoint, and it’s accessible only to University people.The School’s computing help information is still at computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk.
We’re pleased to announce Virtual DICE for 2024–25. Here’s how to download it. What’s Virtual DICE? The managed Linux machines here in the School of Informatics run DICE, based on Ubuntu Linux. We use DICE on desktop computers and on servers, but there’s also a virtual version called Virtual DICE. It runs in VirtualBox, and […]
Many of us use Microsoft Remote Desktop to connect from home to computers at Informatics, so that we can use DICE Linux or Windows. (If you don’t do that yet, but you would like to, see our remote desktop service help pages.)If you’ve fired up Microsoft Remote Desktop recently, you may have seen a message […]
The groups.inf.ed.ac.uk web service is due to be upgraded on July 1st. This will be an upgrade from SL7 to Ubuntu Jammy (similar to homepages and other DICE machines or servers). Like homepages, the most notable changes will be to PHP and Python. OSSL7Ubuntu JammyPython2.73.10PHP7.38.1 Although most pages on groups.inf.ed.ac.uk are static, if yours doesn’t […]
