Redhat, who provide the Linux platform on which DICE is based, has recently released a beta version of their latest release – RHEL 7. We have started work on porting DICE to this platform, with a view to upgrading DICE desktops to a RHEL 7 based platform this summer. This will result in many core […]

Please help to reduce the University’s energy bill by switching off any equipment, including computers and monitors, that you are unlikely to use over the Xmas break. If you are responsible for research group servers, please consider powering these down over the vacation. Contact support if you need computing staff to do this for you. […]

We suffered a power failure in the Informatics Forum on Monday 11th November 2013, starting at about 11am and ending at about 1pm. We still have no information from Estates and Buildings as to why this failure occured. Many users were surprised to find that whilst power to their desktops and the network wasn’t interrupted, […]

I am pleased to announce that we have appointed Chris Cooke to be Editor of the Computing documentation site. Chris will be responsible for overseeing the general structure of the site, ensuring that computing staff keep their documentation up-to-date and identifying and commissioning new content. If you wish to comment on existing content or suggest […]

Periodically, we test our preparedness for disasters by holding a mock disaster exercise. On 27th February, the computing staff were told that part of the roof of the Forum server room had collapsed due to flood damage and that this had destroyed a number of the server racks. Obviously in such a scenario, it would […]

Some of you may be interested in how we have spent the Computing budget for 2010/2011. If you have any questions, please ask. Capital Expenditure Desktops (£90,000) – replacing 170 elderly and unreliable desktops and adding an additional 24 desktops to the Appleton Tower teaching labs. The new desktops are more capable of being put […]

As announced a couple of months back, we shall shortly be upgrading DICE desktops to Scientific Linux 6 (SL6), starting with the teaching labs. We propose to take this opportunity to switch the default architecture from 32bit to 64bit. SL6 is fully supported on 64bit and we believe all of our local environment also works […]

One of our VMware host servers has dropped off the network twice this week for no apparent reason. We are going to reboot the server (and its virtual servers) at 8am on Friday 29th April to see if this fixes the problem. The affected services are :- OpenConf service ISS RT Seacliffe (Qualnet licence server) […]

This is an early warning that we shall be upgrading DICE desktops to Scientific Linux 6 (SL6) this summer/autumn. SL6, which is based on Redhat’s Enterprise Linux 6, is very similar to Fedora 13 on which our current DICE desktop platform is based. However, support for Fedora 13 is about to be withdrawn – Fedora […]

The Informatics Computing Plan for 2011 is now available. This plan reviews progress with respect to the previous plan for 2010, enumerates our key aims for 2011 and makes a stab at identifying likely aims for 2012. Comments are very welcome.