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 […]

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 […]

Dear Colleagues, Summary: Appleton Tower DICE lab desktops and PGR compute servers offline from Friday 28th June 19:00 until the morning of Monday 1st July. As you may know, the Appleton Tower (AT) power will need to be switched off for important work on Saturday 29th of June. Because of this, all of User Support […]

As you may have heard, on Saturday 29 June there will be no electricity in Appleton Tower. That’ll mean a weekend shutdown for some servers and services which are run by the Informatics Systems Unit. The affected services will be down for the entire weekend and will be brought back on Monday 1st July. They […]

authenticator.cc is a handy way to generate MFA codes – those numbers that are sometimes demanded by Microsoft online services such as Teams, email and SharePoint. It’s a web browser extension, and it works with Firefox, Google Chrome, or Microsoft Edge. It gives you a button on your browser which, when you click it, generates […]

We’re pleased to announce a new version of Virtual DICE for 2023–24. Here’s how to download it. What’s Virtual DICE? The managed Linux machines here in the School of Informatics run an environment which we call DICE. It’s based on Ubuntu Linux. We use DICE on desktop computers and on servers, but there’s also a […]

(Now updated to mention otpclient.) As you may know, the University is introducing MFA, or Multi-Factor Authentication. It’s doing this to increase security, to protect us from increasingly severe online threats. At the moment MFA is specifically for Microsoft services – Teams, email, SharePoint, Office 365, and so on. What is MFA? In practice what […]

What you need to know In the next few weeks quite a few Informatics web servers – and other computing services – will be shut down for a short time. Most of them will go down for only a few minutes, but a few servers will have to be down for an hour or two. […]