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.

Although most pages on groups.inf.ed.ac.uk are static, if yours doesn’t fall into this category, you may want to check if things work on Ubuntu Jammy.

Currently, you can test any changes at https://groups-uj.inf.ed.ac.uk/

Both groups.inf.ed.ac.uk and groups-uj.inf.ed.ac.uk serve content from your AFS group space.

We suggest that you give all your pages a test, as we plan to make the upgrade on Monday 1st July. During this period, the Jammy server will only be accessible from inside the University, including the University VPN.

If your page does use CGIs or PHP and 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.

Using an example from the homepages.inf upgrade:

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.

The following are domains are also hosted on the groups.inf server, and will also be affected by the upgrade. See this temporary, restricted, computing.help page with the list of the domains, and an alternative test URL to try the Ubuntu Jammy version.

https://auth.computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk/groupsinfedacuk-ubuntu-jammy-test-sites

Maya

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