The homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk web service is due to update dated from SL7 to Ubuntu Jammy (the same a normal DICE desktops and servers). This provides version changes for many packages, the most notable being Python and PHP

Any existing code you have that uses these packages is likely to need checked and fixed if they are to remain working. Static HTML pages will be unaffected.

A temporary version of homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk, but running Jammy is available for testing at:

https://homepages-uj.inf.ed.ac.uk

Both the live site and the test site above serve the same content from your /public/homepages/UUN/ file space.

Please give your pages a test, as we will be switching the live homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk to Jammy on Wednesday 19th of June. Note this test URL is only accessible to machines on the University network, including the VPN.

If you have errors with CGIs or PHP, the simplest thing to try is running them from the command line on a Jammy machine eg staff.login.inf.ed.ac.uk.

For example:

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/cgi/neilb/pytest.cgi – works

https://homepages-uj.inf.ed.ac.uk/cgi/neilb/pytest.cgi – gives an error

Running the script from the command line shows:

neilb> ./pytest.cgi 
  File "./pytest.cgi", line 5
    print "Content-type: text/plain"
          ^
SyntaxError: Missing parentheses in call to 'print'. Did you mean print("Content-type: text/plain")?

So in this case the problem is some missing (), that are now mandatory for the Python print function. For python you may have some luck automatically fixing things like this with the “futurize” command. If you are are really stuck, use the computing support form to ask for assistance.

You may also be able to see the error via this CGI

https://homepages-uj.inf.ed.ac.uk/cgi/neilb/errorlogs

which is authenticated and will only show the most recent error log entries in the web server containing your UUN.

Neil

homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk upgrade / Computing Systems by is licensed under a